As I mentioned earlier today on the live blog, we will be watching races featuring female Republicans. Currently, 26 women serve in the U.S. Senate, and of those just nine are Republicans, six of whom are up for reelection this cycle. According to our forecast, the number of GOP women in the Senate will likely shrink when all the votes are counted. That’s because of the six women up for reelection, four are in precarious positions — Sen. Martha McSally in Arizona, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia. (Sen. Shelley Moore Capito’s seat in West Virginia is safe, as is Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s seat in Mississippi.)

Of these four Senators in tough races, Ernst is best positioned, with our forecast giving her a 58 in 100 shot at reelection. Last month, in their profile of Ernst, The New Republic dug into some of the complications women face running for office in the party of Trump. In particular, Ernst, herself a survivor of sexual assault, gets questions about some of Trump’s alleged behavior or statements he makes. Moreover, voters in Ernst’s party are less likely than Democrats to consider gender representation important. As we’ve written, while the vast majority of Democratic voters agree that there are too few women in political office, just 33 percent of Republicans think so. To add to that, much of the progress the GOP has made in the Senate is due to appointments — Hyde-Smith, McSally, and Kelly Loeffler all first came to their Senate seats by appointment, which suggests an effort by the GOP to increase the number of women in its ranks. But appointments might not be enough to keep those numbers up.