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Scott Brown greets supporters in the crowd at a campaign rally in Hudson, N.H.
BRIAN SNYDER

If Republican candidates win in North Carolina and New Hampshire, the GOP will have a good night. If Democrats win in Georgia and Iowa, the party will feel good about its chances of holding on to the Senate majority.

Those are the four states that the heads of the parties’ Senate fundraising committees are looking at for early signs of momentum. They sparred Thursday at a Politico Playbook luncheon in Washington, which featured debates over what types of campaigns the two sides have run and jabs at each other’s candidates.

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All four of those states have candidates currently deadlocked in the polls. In North Carolina and New Hampshire, Democratic incumbents are seeking to fend off challenges from Republicans, and in the latter state, GOP Senate nominee Scott Brown has picked up steam in recent weeks. In Georgia and Iowa, candidates are fighting to fill open seats.

Democrats’ success in Georgia so far has been one of the biggest surprises of the cycle, said Guy Cecil, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Polls show Democrat Michelle Nunn tied with Republican David Perdue in the traditionally red state, and Mr. Perdue has come under fire in recent weeks for comments he made about outsourcing. One of the reasons Ms. Nunn is doing so well—in addition to being the “best candidate” of the cycle—is that Democrats’ effort to focus on local issues has succeeded there. “The No. 1 issue on either side of the aisle is not Obama, it’s outsourcing,” he said.

For his part, Rob Collins, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said he was confident Georgia would remain in Republican hands.

The two directors tussled over which side has run a more localized campaign. Mr. Cecil said Democrats had consistently sought to make competitive races focus on the candidates on the ballot. Republicans, he said, are trying to make the election a referendum on President Barack Obama, whose popularity remains low, and a host of national issues. Pointing to the historical trend of the president’s party losing seats in Congress in the second term, he said, “We are not going to nationalize the election and play on the terrain of the Republican party.”

Rob Collins, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Mr. Obama’s unpopularity and a slew of recent crises—the influx of child migrants over the southern border with Mexico, the war against Islamic State in the Middle East, the Ebola outbreak—have helped Republican candidates. “There’s an opportunity to talk to the American people and say there’s an alternative, there’s a different direction here,” he said.

That combination of factors also made it easier to recruit Republican candidates to run this cycle, he said. “It helped us talk to people and say there’s an opportunity here—there’s an opportunity to run, serve and win.”

But Mr. Collins pushed back on the idea that Republicans have only focused on national issues this cycle. “We have framed it through the prism of a group of incumbents who have voted with an unpopular president over 90% of the time, but we have talked about local issues,” he said. Republicans this cycle were careful not to repeat the mistakes of 2010 of 2012, when candidates would respond to any attack by criticizing the Affordable Care Act, regardless of whether there was a connection. “We were not going to make that mistake, and we haven’t made that mistake,” he said, pointing to GOP Senate nominee Cory Gardner of Colorado, who ran an ad on the subject of wind energy, as an example of a candidate discussing local issues.

Republicans’ primary strategy this cycle has been to tie their Democratic opponents to Mr. Obama, especially in red states where his support is particularly low. GOP candidates in New Hampshire, Arkansas, Louisiana and others have criticized Democratic incumbents there as “rubber stamps” for Mr. Obama’s policies. Democrats, meanwhile, have largely shied away from the unpopular president—to the extent that Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky refused to say who she voted for in 2008 and 2012 .

Both directors seemed unsure whether majority control of the Senate would be decided by Tuesday night. Both parties have already reserved millions in airtime after Election Day in Louisiana, where polls show Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu in a tight race with Republican Bill Cassidy. The contest is complicated by a third candidate, Rob Maness, who could prevent either candidate from getting to the necessary 50% to avoid a runoff.

Election night won’t be an “early night, but we could have knowledge of the majority,” Mr. Collins said, adding that momentum is in Republicans’ favor. Earlier this month, he was more blunt in his predictions, saying at a press briefing: “I think we’re going to take the Senate. We’re going to take it on Election Day.”

 

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Latest midterm polls | Senate map, contest | WSJ/NBC Poll

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