Kansas Senate odds move to 40 in 100 for Hamilton after a Wedgewood poll

Our model now gives Adam Hamilton, the Democrat, a 40 in 100 chance of winning the Kansas Senate race, and Roger Marshall, the Republican incumbent, a 60 percent chance. That is a move of 14.8 points of Democratic win probability since our previous run on September 18, when the same estimate stood at 25 percent. Six days separate the two runs.

One poll arrived in between. Wedgewood Polls surveyed 500 likely voters from September 22 to 24 and found Hamilton at 50 percent, Marshall at 48 percent and other candidates at 2 percent. The payload does not include a margin of error for that survey, and a two-point separation in a sample of 500 is close enough that the poll is best read as a close race rather than as a lead for either candidate.

Our expected margin moved with the probability. The mean margin in this run is R+1.5, against R+4.0 a week ago. The spread of simulated outcomes is wide and has widened slightly: our 5th-to-95th percentile range now runs from R+11.0 to D+8.1, compared with R+13.7 to D+5.8 in the September 18 run. Both ranges cross zero comfortably, which is the model's way of saying it does not consider either candidate safe with 40 days left.

Kansas matters to the wider picture because the Senate is close in our simulations. We give Democrats a 57 percent chance of winning Senate control and Republicans 43 percent, with a mean of 50.8 Democratic seats. Democrats need 51 seats for control and Republicans need 50, because the vice president is a Republican and a 50-50 tie goes to the Republicans. A seat priced near even, as Kansas now is, sits close to the center of that arithmetic.