GOP trailing in 8 battleground Senate races 2 months before Election Day: polling aggregate

WASHINGTON — Republicans are trailing in eight of the major battleground Senate races, just two months out from Election Day, the RealClearPolitics aggregate of polling shows.The GOP had long been widely seen as the underdogs for control of the House due to historical trends against the party in control of the White House, but the Senate map is starting to look increasingly fraught, even in once reliably red states such as Texas and Ohio.“It points out the obvious that Republicans are in pretty bad shape going into the midterms and that they’re looking at historic losses,” Republican strategist Terry Holt bluntly told The Post about the bleak polling.“The question is whether some of these races can be saved with some miraculous turnout that apparently is going to be very expensive or whether or not the mood in this country can be changed fundamentally.”Republicans are down 2 points in Alaska, 7.5 points in Georgia, 2.3 points in Maine, 1.8 points in Michigan, 2.6 points in Ohio, 2 points in New Hampshire, 8 points in North Carolina, and 1.9 points in Texas, according to the latest RCP polling aggregate data of the Senate races.One bright spot for the party is Rep.Ashley Hinson’s (R-Iowa) 1.4 percentage-point lead in the Hawkeye State over Josh Turek.

The problem is Iowa appears to be far more competitive than it had been during recent cycles.Democrats currently hold three of the battleground seats in contention, while Republicans have the other six.All of the battleground races in the RCP aggregate, except Georgia and North Carolina, are within what would usually be the margin of error in a typical poll.

“National Republicans have been sounding the alarm that midterms are hard since last year, and we’ve been firm that not a single race should be taken for granted,” one Republican operative involved in Senate races told The Post.That operative stressed that “Republicans continue to believe we’ll hold the Senate” and pointed to a recent an...