Nate Silver notes that “while Republican incumbent senators have gotten some credit lately for their clutch performances in Kansas, Mississippi and other states, where they’ve fended off challenges from more conservative opponents, the GOP still has plenty to worry about. There have been far more close calls to its incumbents than usual.”

“Between 2004 and 2008, just four of 39 Republican senators running for renomination, or 10 percent of them, got less than 65 percent of the primary vote. This year, five of 10 have fallen below that threshold: not only Roberts, Cochran and McConnell, but also Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, who both benefited from running against divided fields.”

A new Associated Press-GfK poll finds that nearly 9 in 10 Americans say they disapprove of how Congress is handling its job, and 6 in 10 disapprove of President Obama. More than half of Americans, 54 percent, disapprove of both.

Mary Burke (D) put out a devastatingly effective ad against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) that should make Republicans at least a little more worried.

Chris Cillizza: “I’ve become convinced that the best (read: most effective) negative ads in the modern political world are those that feature a politician’s own words. The video of Walker promising that he would create 250,000 jobs is political gold — and something the Burke campaign can just keep running on TV in lots of different iterations between now and November.”

[Read more…]

Democrats were thrilled to see that Republicans “are going to spend early and big on the Georgia U.S. Senate race,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.

“The news that the National Republican Senatorial Committee will spend $2.5 million on Atlanta TV on a five-week span starting Tuesday — a huge sum at this stage of the race — was immediately picked up by Democrats as evidence that Georgia is not as safe as the GOP would like to claim.”

A new Vox Populi (R) poll in Montana finds Steve Daines (R) way ahead of Sen. John Walsh (D) in the U.S. Senate race, 47% to 34%.

A man who claimed Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-MS) campaign asked him to pay people to vote for Cochran now says he was actually paid $2,000 by a member of Chris McDaniel’s (R) campaign to make the accusation, the Jackson Clarion Ledger reports.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) denied running away from a potential confrontation with an immigration activist in Iowa, Business Insider reports.

Said Paul: “Now you know my life. You know my life on the campaign trail. About five minutes before that — or two minutes before that — the video doesn’t show that — another reporter came up and said, ‘Will you do an interview?’ I said, ‘I need to take a couple more bites and we’ll do an interview.’ And then I was told we need to leave.”

Bloomberg says the cost of the GOP civil war has been more than $135 million already this year.

“The yearlong fight over the direction of the Republican Party — stretched over two dozen Senate and House primaries involving more than 50 candidates — means the tug-of-war will go on, extending into next year’s debate on the debt ceiling and the 2016 presidential and congressional races.”