I got aimlessly directed to the latest Fox News poll this morning, and as I was browsing through it I came across its results for the generic congressional ballot ("Would you vote for the R or D candidate in your district?"). Here it is:
For some reason I was under the impression that Democrats were way underwater right now, but the difference is actually only three points. FiveThirtyEight has it at two points.
Obviously that's hardly good news for Democrats, who need to be well ahead to retain their majority, but it doesn't quite sound like a disaster either. And who knows? Maybe Dems can get their act together and improve on this. It's not the craziest idea in the world.¹
¹Close, though.
Estimates I've seen say Ds need a 10 to 20% advantage to hold the House. So we're down at least 14 from what we need.
I don't know why the polling works like this, but yeah, 2-3% down = historic shellacking, kiss American democracy goodbye. 5-10% up = tossup, probably lose some seats; 10-20% up = just hang on, maybe pick up a few seats.
It's because of packing and cracking. On average, Democratic-leaning districts are more strongly Democratic than Republican-leaning districts are Republican, so Democratic votes are diluted.
Yes. Sam Wang has thoroughly investigated the effects of gerrymandering and the bias it produces against Democrats. But the bias, I think, is about 4 percentage points. Dems have to be up 4% in the generic polls to be just competitive.
in 2018, the final margin in most polls had democrats up 7 or 8 points and we all know what happened that november. if we're up 5-10, we're probably holding steady to gaining seats. never underestimate trump's ability to screw his own party.
Historical midterm trends and the economy don't bode well for the party in power. I'd wager that if Trump looks truly damaged come November a not-smallish part of the electorate may think a protest vote is not as troublesome.
The GOP is energized as F and that adds another level of doubt.
GOP looks very deenergized. Lack of turnout is a problem.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if the Supreme Court overturns Roe vs. Wade and sends abortion rights back to the states, all bets are off. You're going to see a lot of Republicans twisting and squirming trying to explain to voters why a woman who has been raped or impregnated by an uncle or her father should not be allowed to have an abortion. Or why an abortion at 6 or 8 weeks is OK, but after that it's murder. Or why it's OK to refuse a covid vaccine because "it's my body", but the State can force a woman to carry a baby to term, or else. It's not going to be pretty.
Maybe, but I think marginal voters tend to vote based on the economy and not much else. Anyone who gets fired up by abortion is already decided
It’ll make the base of either party turn out more but that’s a wash in my mind, hard to say who benefits more from that
The R women forced to carry a baby that they don’t want this fall might start voting D… which in turn might make the difference in some close elections.
Or we're going to see a lot of crazy talk (already started today...) about overturning the Supreme Court and restoring States Rights regarding Gun Control [and unrestoring them regarding Abortion].
Reasonable people who might have been planning to vote Dem in disgust at the 1/6 riot asking themselves "well, if both parties are dominated by crazies who don't believe in either the constitution or compromise, I guess I might as well vote on other grounds [or sit this one out".
Let's see if this particular round of "we really ought to do something about the Supreme Court, it doesn't speak for us" is the usual grumbling or gets taken further. Right now I'm not sure how it will play out.
Nice try but there's not going to be any valid "both sides" on the crazies. It's all about whether or not the Democrats can get the ill-informed causal voter centrists terrified enough to run out and vote Democratic to save the country.
What about Jane’s Revenge?
Nut picking al la Fox News doesn't prove your point.
Really?
You don't think normal people look at a tweet like this and shudder?
https://twitter.com/NickoGallo/status/1540340989251969026
Someone COMPLAINING that congress passed a bill protecting SCOTUS justices...
So, you managed to find one Twitter poster. Are they a Democratic rep or Senator? Or shall I go trolling for the rightwing nutjobs there and say they represent all Republicans?
Senate Democrats just gave up a great many provisions they wanted to get a compromise on gun violence. Republicans gave up almost nothing, because the states they control won’t implement the ‘red flag’ laws, even when there’s money on the table. They already proved that with ACA - they weren’t going to let their low-income residents benefit from healthcare coverage, even if the Federal government was willing to pay for almost all of it.
Say, the Democrats ought to be doing a lot more of this - pass benefit programs with opt-outs. Blue states have been subsidizing red states for decades - when red states refuse to take federal money to help their own, we’ll still be taxing them to pay blue-state beneficiaries; tables turned. How do you like them apples?
We did that on a massive scale with the ACA and Medicaid (or, rather, SCOTUS did it for us). I'm still stunned at how many red states continue to turn down a mountain of federal money to provide their own constituents with health care.
Perhaps the continued ruling from SCOTUS (aka "those ultra right wing GOP political hacks") as they march all of us into their gun toting Theonomic utopia, will provide the incentive for the rest of us to go out and vote.
Maybe we're beginning to see a trend of more people realizing that one of the two major party's active or tacit participation in the destruction of the Constitution has a longer term downside than the temporarily high price of gasoline. (I know, call me a dreamer.)
Yeah, opec is up to 650 barrels in term of a target and need to supply a missing 1 million barrels they are behind with the old target(though it is starting to fill in gaps, it was 1.5 million a month ago). Another vestige of omicron winter.
Congressional straw polls are the crappiest of indictors. Nobody cares until Labor Day. Democrats over ideology them, when you need party leaders who the into the state political infrastructure. Affirmative action candidates get lost.
It really does seem to be a difficult election year to predict. Obviously, the first midterm election for a President and his party, held during a time of relatively high inflation, would seem to spell doom for that party. And yet:
*There are ongoing, televised, and surprisingly engaging and effective congressional committee hearings underway, and they unambiguously paint the opposition (Trump/Republican) party as a group of unrepentant thugs, thieves, and autocrats.
*Trump continues to loudly and publicly insert himself into any number of primary and, no doubt, general election races, thereby potentially transforming the midterms into another referendum on him (rather than the incumbent President).
*The obviously radical, and Republican dominated, Supreme Court continues to hand down one shocking and galvanizing ruling after another on everything from guns to abortion (honestly, it almost begins to look like they're TRYING to get out the Democratic vote).
*And, among many other factors, the Dems really can make a case for themselves if they can get their messaging together: unemployment is historically low, an effective vaccination program helped stabilize the sane parts of the country, post-pandemic life is definitely returning to normal, big legislative achievements (the Rescue package, the Infrastructure Bill) are having a positive impact; and, perhaps most important of all, the DEMs can and should scream from the hilltops that they are not the certifiably insane party and they're not the actively and explicitly anti-democracy party!
"paint the opposition (Trump/Republican) party as a group of unrepentant thugs, thieves, and autocrats."
Agreed. BUT that's only a negative if your starting point is that the constitution is a good thing to be preserved. The Dems are doing their level best to destroy their side of that consensus in so many matters.
The Constitution is a set of rules, it's not a document that says "my way or the highway". And the the constant refrain I hear from the Dems is fury whenever this set of rules gives a result (most recently Abortion or Gun Rights) that's a reasonable compromise but which they don't like.
If you spend most of your political capital insisting that the system is illegitimate, controlled by the "wrong people", biased against "people like us" and so on; well then you're not going to look especially good when you start prosecuting people whose crime was to listen to those complaints, believe them, and act on them.
Bunch of malarkey.
Do you entertain for one second the notion that anyone here believes you're not a troll? Or that anyone gives your opinions the slightest credence in light of that knowledge?
But then again, maybe you do; your words give every indication of being authored by not the brightest crayon in the box -- in fact, your trolling style is about twenty-five years out of date.
Even if Trump doesn’t succeed in making the midterms all about himself, I think he’s going to continue to be chaotic evil for his own party. On net, he’ll be a drag on Republican chances in the midterms; how much, remains to be seen.
I'm no statistician, but it doesn't look like the trend line would be going up.
The 2022 outcome will not depend on Democrats "getting their act together", unless that means Manchin and Sinema joining the rest of the party to break the filibuster and pass some things. And what is Kevin's plan to get them to do that? This continual blaming of Democrats (by many pundits and bloggers besides Kevin) for not doing the impossible gets very tiresome. Kevin keeps pointing out the importance of Fox News, so what exactly does he think that Democrats should be doing about that?
Democrats do have an act going right now in the January 6 hearings. This might have some effect, but really it is not bringing out anything fundamentally new. Legal details about exactly what Trump did are not likely to influence many voters - how many people don't have a pretty good idea of what went on? The presumably pending abortion decision may also have an effect, but abortion is still fairly low in lists of voters' priorities.
The main decider will probably be the economy, and nobody really controls that*. If inflation does come down sharply it could be a big boost. It's the trend that influences voters - or what they think the trend is - rather than the current state, unless it is really bad.
*No, the Fed does not control the economy or even inflation. If it does raise federal funds to 1980 levels (the current rate is a small fraction of that) it could cause a recession, but those raises in the 70's failed to prevent inflation.
"I'm not a member of an organized political party. I'm a Democrat." -- Will Rogers
How dumb is Biden's 3-month gas tax proposal?
- If passed right away, it would expire just over a month before the midterms when Congress is out of town campaigning.
- By itself, it has no meaningful impact. Half of it will get absorbed by refiners and the other half will be eaten up by higher prices from marginally increased demand that would not have otherwise existed.
- It puts Democrats in Congress in a tough position to support an unpopular plan that is both contrary to the reduction of GHG and illusory at best.
- If it fails to impact prices, Republicans will rhetorically lambast Biden and Democrats for supporting failed policies.
Nonetheless, if Democrats are going to pass a bill, they need to play it smart.
- If possible, wait to pass it until the middle of August, so as to time it with the end of the driving season and just before the switch to winter formulation which will additionally cut prices between $0.05- $0.15 a gallon just on the formulation alone.
- Make the gas tax holiday extend past the midterm.
- Add $1B to pay for monthly free public transit passes, distributed via local transportation officials until the funds run out. This way, those who can displace driving with public transit, will. Their switch to public transit will instantly have an effect on supply and demand of gasoline, allowing prices to drop and allowing Biden to maintain pressure on refiners who cut back.
Enormously dumb. And usually when a policy is that genuinely stupid, it doesn't even help politically (at least not for Democrats, who seem to value policy coherence more than Republicans).
It's really not a good sign, and points to a panicky White House that's allowing said panic to cloud its judgment.
The evidence is that price has little effect on gasoline usage in the short term, so there wouldn’t be a surge in demand from such a modest change. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=19191
The White House party has managed to avoid losing House seats in midterms only three times, I think, since at least 1902. IOW 95% of the time it loses ground. I'm maximally skeptical Roe or the Jan 6 committee or any other factors will outweigh the combination of history and gas prices.
PS—I've long thought it likely, however, that Democratic House losses are likely to be modest. This is mainly because Dems don't have a large majority, and so they're not defending a lot of vulnerable territory.
So maybe right wing overreach and awfulness will make these losses more modest, still. (Unfortunately only a few seats need to flip to give the GOP the majority; but hopefully if their majority ends up being extremely modest, they won't be able to get up to much mischief. The critical congressional election comes in 2024, as it will decide the composition of the Congress that certifies the presidential election).
I make no predictions as to the Senate. The prospects for that chamber seem highly opaque to my eyes. They have some plainly awful candidates. But then again Joe Biden's apparently less popular in America than Josef Stalin.
The last time the Republicans controlled the House, it did almost nothing at all, despite the best efforts of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, both of whom have far better political skills than Kevin McCarthy (or any other Republican with a chance to become Speaker). And the Republican crazies in the next Congress will be crazier, dumber and more numerous than those former Speakers had to deal with. And half of the sane ones aren’t there to accomplish anything, just to perform for the Fox News audience.
Agreed, be careful what you wish for. Dems losing control of the House didn't exactly sink Bill Clinton or Barak Obama. If anything it made them more popular because it gave them a villan foil to play off of.
I remember my father, a retirement IRS agent, gave a speech a my brother wedding dinner to an audience of well-to-do Republicans, many of them from Texas, who populated his bride's family proudly proclaiming his occupation to all those booing "Well, somebody's got to be the SOB."
Yep and for the first time in a long time the SOB is going to be the GOP.
Hey, y'all ban books, ban abortions, same-sex marriage, trans kids,? Fine then. Now you have to enforce the law. And good luck with that all you wanna-be Buford T. Justices. Because from what was witnessed in Texas after a woman was arrested and jailed for an apparent abortion attempt and set free in embarrassment, it's one thing to call for a ban on something, another to try and enforce it. And for all the talk about "law and order" there's still something in the American psyche that sympathetic to those outlaw who aren't seen as hurting somebody or enriching themselves when already rich (witness Smokey and the Bandit and all the other moonshiners and bootleggers out there. Just so long as they are White). Throwing women in jail or having abortion catchers roaming the countryside looking for pregnant women is not something that's going to be looked upon with much approval outside of the anti-abortion fanatics.
For years "conservatives" could get away with talking about "little cabals elites planning your lives for you," as Reagan put it, and could get away with after years of liberal governance, even under Republican Presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford. Now the little cabal is in the state capital telling you what books you can and can't read, what words you can and can't say, and now whether you can get abortions or not even to the point of trying to restricting the travel of people willing to do so to get the procedure.
The dirty secret of "conservative movement" it seems to me, is that for all their qualms about Federal control over pour lives, they certainly don't mind it when state and local government execute that same kind of power over people's lives at home. Not even the Libertarians it seems, sadly, are all that interested anymore in such contradictions (because they're too busy kissing Trump's ass). It's why no long call myself a conservative and I think many other will too after the dog has finally caught the car bumper.
If I a Dem this is what I'm hoping for in November:
- No more than 25 lost House seats
- No losses or a gain of two or more seats in the Senate and or remaining in control (and it can happen even to the party in power witness 1982, 2010, 2018)
- Holding the governorships in Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan and perhaps gaining one in the Sunbelt (Arizona?)
That would be a good mid-term outcome.