Four Senate races remain tight in sprint to Election Day, polls show
Republicans are defending narrow majorities in the Senate and Democrats are struggling to keep pace. Here are three key Senate races:
The first Senate race to be called this year is in the state of Vermont, where Sen. Bernie Sanders has made a run at the right and anti-Trump left in a race that could determine the balance of power in the upper chamber.
Vermont’s two U.S. senators are Republicans have fought over immigration in the past, with GOP Sen. James Lankford criticizing Sanders as soft on border security two years ago and calling President Trump “an idiot” for being tough on illegal immigration.
That has spurred Sanders’ campaign to paint Lankford as an “establishment” Republican who would not defend Sanders’ efforts to protect people living in the country illegally.
That has put Lankford in an awkward position at home on the campaign trail in Burlington, Vermont. He is being pressed by Sanders to join him in a bipartisan effort to secure the southern border, so that undocumented people seeking asylum can get “legal” permission to stay in the United States.
“I will not let Bernie Sanders hijack the democratic process,” Lankford said last weekend at an event in Vermont.
“There has been a tremendous increase in the number of people who are crossing into the country illegally,” he said. “That is one of the principal reasons why we need to make sure that legal immigration can be properly balanced with the enforcement of our laws.”
Sanders’ campaign has been able to push Lankford to the right on immigration. Sanders has criticized Lankford, who has been a critic of Trump, as soft on border security.
In July, Lankford held a fundraiser for Sanders in Burlington that drew about 400 people, but it was his highest attendance of the Sanders campaign at a fundraiser since it began in 2016.
The next day, Lankford and seven other GOP senators stood with the Democratic caucus and introduced a bipartisan spending bill that included Democratic priorities on immigration. Some of those priorities were included in the spending bill passed by the