It looks like the Republicans might not take the Senate after all. The reason? Montana

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ISLANDne day from Election Day 2024, and Republican control of the Senate suddenly looks a lot less secure.

It had been seen as a near-inevitability by some for months. With the loss of West Virginia’s seat thanks to the retirement of Joe Manchin, the defeat of Jon Tester — the incumbent senator from Montana who has been trailing his opponent Tim Sheehy throughout the summer and fall — was set to throw the majority into GOP hands, unless the Democrats unseat a Republican incumbent elsewhere.

But on Monday, that calculation looked very different. A couple of new polls released over the weekend from Des Moines Register and New York Times/Siena College chronicled a race that suddenly swung in Democrats’ favor in virtually every major battleground state. That includes Iowa, where Harris now leads Donald Trump by three percentage points Register vote.

And Montana may be no different. Stephen Leuchtman, director of polling for Pharos Research Group, tweeted Monday that his firm had conducted a final poll of the Montana race that ended Sunday. That found Tester four percentage points ahead of Sheehy, according to Leuchtman, who did not release the full poll results (his firm does private polling), just within the survey’s 4.97 percent margin of error.

It’s far from a sure thing, but the poll falls roughly in line with two other surveys taken in mid-to-late October that found the gap between the two candidates narrowing rapidly from earlier in the year. One, from The Hill/Emerson College, found the Republican leading by three percentage points – within the margin of error – while another from the University of Montana – Billings study found the race tied.

Sheehy’s poll collapse and potential defeat on Tuesday may well end up being a casualty of his inability to provide a clear explanation and evidence for a scandal that has dogged him for months: the case of the bullet wound to his right arm, which Sheehy maintains. suffered during a deployment to Afghanistan.

His opponent, Tester, is a centrist Democrat, but a more reliable Democratic vote than fellow perennial Biden-Harris administration headaches Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin (both Sinema and Manchin declined to run for re-election, facing their own polls). . Tester is no stranger to being the “most vulnerable” Democratic incumbent — he carried that label in both his 2012 and 2018 races, both of which he narrowly won, the latter while Donald Trump was campaigning with his opponent. But 2024 has seen some of the most brutal polling for his campaign in memory, with some polls finding him down by as many as 8 percentage points in early October. For weeks everyone was convinced it was all over.

Then came a controversy surrounding his Republican opponent. A former Navy SEAL decorated for his actions in combat, Sheehy claims he was shot in the right arm during a possible friendly fire incident during his deployment. The bullet remained lodged in his arm, but he says he did not receive formal medical treatment at the time and covered up the injury to avoid implicating Afghan security forces, who he says he suspected accidentally hit him.

Then, in 2015, a year after he left active duty, Sheehy says, the story developed even more. He claims he was on a trip to Glacier National Park when he fell and injured the same arm on a hike. He sought medical attention and was reportedly told at the time that doctors would have to report the bullet in his arm to the police. So, Sheehy says, he lied again — this time to an American Park Ranger, Kim Peach, who told her he accidentally shot himself in the parking lot when he dropped a loaded gun and it fired, hitting him in the arm.

His latest attempt to explain the incident came Saturday during a conversation with Megyn Kelly, a conservative journalist. Kelly began the interview respectfully, but within a very short period of time she began to question the veracity of very basic aspects of his explanation.

“Did you shoot yourself in the arm?” asked a stern, skeptical Kelly Sheehy.

“No, that was never the allegation,” Sheehy replied.

That was it. Peach has come forward in an interview with Washington Post to claim that Sheehy definitely said he had shot himself in the arm that day in 2015 at Glacier.

Still unexplained, after his interview with Kelly: why Sheehy should have had to lie to an American Park Ranger who had no authority or ability to investigate his (allegedly true) story that he was actually shot in Afghanistan. Still unexplained: why Peach, the Ranger, said a gunshot was reported that day in the park, prompting her investigation. Still unexplained: why medics at the park would have even had to report the presence of a bullet in his arm to law enforcement if there hadn’t been a shooting that day at the park.

There are also Sheehy’s statements about the medical records – he says they don’t exist. And he has nothing, not even a photo, to prove that a bullet was put in his arm prior to that 2015 park visit.

Simply put, there are many holes in a story that should be about just one.

Republicans are in full panic mode. With the number of early voters coming in, the Trump campaign on Monday desperately tried to get a reduction in early voting from pandemic levels in 2020 as a positive sign. But several media reports indicate that the party is coming to terms with some very poor poll numbers.

“The meltdown is about to begin,” wrote former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci on Sunday night. “They’ve found out how bad it is.”

If this collapse is as real as it seems, Jon Tester could return to Washington next week as the ultimate comeback kid.