01Race developments
Roy Cooper (D) 54% — Michael Whatley (R) 40%, 5% undecided, in a new WRAL/WSOC poll released Oct 13 — a notably wider lead than the Oct 7 YouGov/Catawba College reading (47–35), though both show Cooper comfortably ahead in the race for Thom Tillis's open seat.
Peggy Flanagan (D) 47% — Michele Tafoya (R) 43%, 9% undecided, per a Star Tribune/KARE 11 poll released Oct 12, in the race to succeed retiring Sen. Tina Smith — single digits, worth watching though not yet rated a toss-up by the major forecasters.
Nothing else cleared the bar for this section today beyond items already covered in recent issues (Talarico's return to the trail and the scheduled Fort Worth CNN/Jubilee town hall were reported Oct 14; no independent recap of that town hall, or of a reported Oct 13 Atlanta Press Club Ossoff–Collins rematch, could be confirmed as of this run).
02Polling & forecasts
No fresher reading found. Silver Bulletin's last confirmed average remains D+8.8 (D+9.5 among likely voters) as of Oct 12 — carried forward rather than reporting a possibly-stale number from today's fetch attempts.
No confirmed race-rating changes today. Cook's Senate page is still unchanged since its Oct 6 batch; its House page is dated Oct 9 (the already-reported 18-race batch); its Governor page is dated Oct 13 (the already-reported Alaska/Nebraska/Oklahoma/Vermont batch). Sabato's dedicated rating-changes page and Inside Elections' ratings JSON both failed to load for this run (the JSON's internal "generated at" timestamp is still stuck on Oct 1, as in several prior runs) — so an update there can't be ruled out, but nothing new was independently confirmed by article search either.
03Election administration & security
A federal judge vacated DOJ's entire nationwide voter-roll data program. On Oct 9, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan (D.D.C.) ruled for Common Cause that the Justice Department's "list maintenance" effort — demanding unredacted voter rolls from nearly all 50 states and checking them against the federal SAVE immigration database to flag people it considered ineligible — exceeded DOJ's authority under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the NVRA, and HAVA. She vacated the policy nationwide under the Administrative Procedure Act, including for the roughly 18 states that had already complied, and barred DOJ from using that data or sharing it with DHS. She wrote the policy amounted to "the federal government's attempt to decide who gets to vote," a decision Congress left to the states. DOJ said it's reviewing the ruling; separately, federal law bars systematic roll purges within 90 days of a federal election, which may limit the practical effect before Nov. 3.
DOJ's separate state-by-state voter-roll lawsuits remain dismissed in 26 of 30 cases (consistent with the figure cited in the Sooknanan ruling above); the 4 still pending — Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Utah — have no new rulings as of this run. No Supreme Court action found on any pending election-related emergency applications.
04Seat-change score
Today's score: 0 — no confirmed nonpartisan race-rating changes found today (see Polling & Forecasts above for what was checked).
| Date | Score | What drove it |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 9 | 0 | None confirmed. |
| Oct 10 | 0 | None confirmed — ratings sites largely unreachable this run. |
| Oct 11 | 0 | None confirmed; a Cook House date-gap flagged but unconfirmed. |
| Oct 12 | 0 | None confirmed despite broad search. |
| Oct 13 | +18 | Cook's Oct 9 House batch (18 races, all D-ward) finally corroborated — resolved the Oct 11–12 gap. |
| Oct 14 | +4 | Cook's Oct 13 governor batch: AK, NE, OK, VT, all D-ward. |
| Oct 15 | 0 | None confirmed today. |