How is the tea party doing in Senate races?

If the 2012 elections are all about outsiders pounding on the door of the political establishment – mainly in the form of the tea party insurgency – it’s worth taking a look at how their most prominent figures are doing the last few days before we’ve all voted and can concentrate on the World Series. (You heard it here: Giants in seven.)

The tea-fueled GOP is all but certain to take control of the US House of Representatives. So we’ll stick with the Senate, where the D’s have more than a fighting chance of hanging on to their majority.

Sharron Angle in Nevada

Expert poll watcher Nate Silver, who blogs at FiveThirtyEight.com for The New York Times, says Sharron Angle “has been improving her position in our forecast in recent days, and for the first time since the spring has better than a three-in-four chance to win her race against Harry Reid.”

A TIME/CNN/Opinion Research survey this week has Ms. Angle up four points over Senate Majority Leader Reid.

Using a complicated online formula, prognosticators at the Daily Beast’s “Election Oracle” give Angle a 60 percent chance of winning. More on this methodology here.

But allegations of early voting fraud and voter intimidation in Nevada may be setting the scene for a legal battle after next Tuesday. Lawyers from both parties are getting ready for a fight that could delay election results. Did someone say “hanging chads?”

Joe Miller in Alaska

Joe Miller’s main threat comes not from Democratic candidate Scott McAdams but from incumbent Republican and write-in candidate Sen. Lisa Murkowski. And from his self-made image problems, like finally admitting under court order this week that he “lied about what I was doing” (as he wrote in a 2008 e-mail) in inappropriately using government computers when he worked as a part-time lawyer in the Fairbanks North Star Borough.

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