Is the race in the New Jersey Senate really a fight? No.

Is the New Jersey Senate race a child's game? The scandals of Democratic Senator Bob Menendez – including a near-miss in a federal court – dominated the race, and Cook's political report has now moved the lean democrat race to a net barely 11 days before the elections . Democrats are already facing a difficult Senate card and it would be bad news for them to lose their seat in a 13-point state more democratic than the nation.

But the "throw" seems too generous to Menendez's Republican opponent, Bob Hugin. Why? Polls. Despite one of the worst approval rates of all senators, Menendez led all the polls of the race.

Now, to be clear, the margins in these surveys have varied: sometimes Menendez with only 2 points, other times with double digits. But if the race was very close, one would expect at least one or two of the polls to give Hugin a slight advantage. It could always happen, but it is not yet the case.

Starting Friday afternoon, the Senate model FiveThirtyEight's Lite forecasts, based on national and national polls, give Menendez 7/8 chances to win reelection, or 87%. To put this in perspective, we give Republicans one in three (83%) chance of winning the Mississippi special election – and no one calls it a snap. The other two versions of our senate model – the classic, which adds to the fundamentals of racing, and luxury, which adds fundamentals and Handicapped experts – puts the chances in Menendez to 9 out of 10 or better. But although the Menendez scandals have helped Hugin's chances (we take into account the scandals in our fundamentals-based forecasts), the effect (R + 8.2) does not seem important enough to overtake the democratic tendencies of the other components. fundamentals.

If the national environment looked more like, say, 2010 – an excellent Republican cycle – the chances of Hugin would probably be greater. Think of Republican Mark Kirk's victory in 2010 in Illinois, a deeply blue state that has also experienced a raging democratic scandal. After Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich used the nomination process to fill Obama's Senate seat to enrich himself. With this outrageous backdrop and national environment heavily marked by the GOP, Kirk won the open-sided match against Democrat Alexi Giannoulias by less than 2 percentage points.

But 2018 is not like 2010. In a blue state and a favorable democratic environment, Menendez remains favored to win. A defeat is possible, but the race is far from being launched.