Three-way Montana tie in new poll narrows our projected margin to R+11

A Quantus Insights survey of 625 likely voters in Montana, fielded September 14-15, found the three-way field bunched together: independent Seth Bodnar at 26.1 percent, Republican Kurt Alme at 25.3 percent and Democrat Alani Bankhead at 24.5 percent. The gap between first and third is 1.6 points. On those numbers no candidate holds a measurable lead.

Our forecast moved, but not much where it matters. The model now gives Bankhead a 3 in 100 chance of winning the seat, up from 1 percent in our previous run earlier the same afternoon, and Alme a 97 percent chance, down from 99 percent. The projected margin narrowed from R+14.6 to R+10.8. The 5th-to-95th percentile range now runs from R+20.6 to R+1.1, compared with R+24.5 to R+4.9 before. That is a wider race at the edges than we had, with the Democratic end of the range now just inside a point.

The direction is the news here. Our last two Montana pieces described a forecast that either widened toward the Republican or did not move at all. This poll pulled the projected margin back by nearly four points while leaving the ordering of the probabilities intact. Our model does not publish a separate win probability for Bodnar in this race, so his narrow first-place figure in the poll is not reflected as one.

Nationally, our model gives Democrats a 48 percent chance of winning Senate control and Republicans 51 percent, with a mean of 50.2 Democratic seats. Democrats need 51 seats; Republicans need 50, because the vice president is a Republican and a 50-50 tie goes to them. Montana sits inside that arithmetic, but at a 97 percent Republican chance it is not one of the seats our model currently treats as competitive.