Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive U.S. reporting and analysis delivered to your inbox

Get our free Inside Washington email

OOn Election Day 2024, Republican control of the Senate suddenly looks a lot less secure.

It had been considered almost inevitable by some for months. With the loss of the West Virginia seat thanks to Joe Manchin’s retirement, the defeat of Jon Tester — the incumbent Senator from Montana, who hounded his opponent Tim Sheehy all summer and fall — would throw the majority into the hands of the GOP. unless Democrats dethrone a Republican incumbent president elsewhere.

But on Monday that calculation looked very different. A few new polls were released this weekend from the Des Moines Register And New York Times/Siena College depicted a race that suddenly swung in Democrats’ favor in virtually every major battleground state. This also applies to Iowa, where Harris now leads Donald Trump in the race by three percentage points Register poll.

And Montana may be no different. Stephen Leuchtman, polling director for Pharos Research Group, tweeted Monday that his company had conducted one final poll on the race in Montana, which ended Sunday. According to Leuchtman, Tester was four percentage points ahead of Sheehy, who did not release the full results of the survey (his company conducts privately commissioned polls), just within the survey’s 4.97 percent margin of error.

It’s far from certain, but the poll is roughly consistent with two other surveys from mid-to-late October that showed the gap between the two candidates rapidly closing compared to earlier this year. One of the researchers, from The Hill/Emerson College, found Republicans ahead by three percentage points – within the margin of error – while a second from the University of Montana – Billings survey showed the race tied.

The collapse in the polls and Sheehy’s possible defeat on Tuesday could well be the result of his failure to provide a clear explanation and evidence for a scandal that has dogged him for months: the gunshot wound case in his right arm, which Sheehy insists. suffered during a deployment to Afghanistan.

His opponent, Tester, is a centrist Democrat, but a more reliably Democratic voice than other perennial Biden-Harris administrations, giving Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin a headache (both Sinema and Manchin declined to run for re-election when faced with their own electoral reality.) Tester is no stranger to being the “most vulnerable” Democratic incumbent — he carried that label in both his 2012 and 2018 runs, both of which he narrowly won, the latter while Donald Trump campaigned with his opponent. But 2024 has seen some of the most brutal polling for his campaign ever, with some surveys showing him trailing by as much as 8 percentage points in early October. For weeks everyone was convinced it was all over.

Then a controversy arose surrounding his Republican opponent. Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL decorated for his actions in combat, claims he was shot in the right arm during a possible friendly fire incident while deployed. The bullet lodged in his arm, but he says he received no formal medical treatment at the time and covered up the injury to avoid involving Afghan security forces, who he suspects may have accidentally hit him.

Then, in 2015, a year after he left active duty, Sheehy said, the story evolved even further. He claims he was traveling to Glacier National Park when he fell while hiking and injured the same arm. He sought medical treatment and was probably told at the time that medical professionals should report the bullet in his arm to police. Then, Sheehy says, he lied again – this time to an American park ranger, Kim Peach, who told her that he had accidentally shot himself in the parking lot when he dropped a loaded gun and fired it, 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 soon found herself doubting the accuracy of basic aspects of his explanation.

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

“No, that was never the accusation,” Sheehy responded.

It was. Peach has come forward in an interview with The Washington Post to claim that Sheehy absolutely said he shot himself in the arm that day in 2015 at Glacier.

Still unexplained, after his interview with Kelly: why Sheehy would have had to lie to an American Park Ranger, who had no authority or ability to investigate his (supposedly true) story that he had actually been shot in Afghanistan. Still unexplained: why Peach, the Ranger, said a gunshot was reported in the park that day, prompting her investigation. Still unexplained: why medical professionals in the park should have reported the presence of a bullet in his arm to police in the first place if no shooting had occurred in the park that day.

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 there was a bullet in his arm prior to that 2015 park visit.

Simply put, it’s a lot of holes in a story that’s supposed to be about just that one thing.

The Republicans are in complete panic. With early voter numbers coming in, the Trump campaign on Monday desperately tried to cast a reduction in early voting from 2020 pandemic levels as a positive sign. But several media reports indicate that the party is having to come to terms with some very poor opinion polls.

“The meltdown is about to begin,” former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci wrote on Sunday evening. “They realize how bad things are.”

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