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How To Fix Democrats' Generic Ballot Woes
It's not enough to know people don't like you; you also have to know why.
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Donald Trump is 20 points under water. He’s flirting with an approval rating in the mid 30s. The public is furious, and not just those of us who’ve always seen through him.
More congressional Republicans have announced their retirements than at any time since 2018 (and 1930 before that). They look around and see Democrats over-performing in special elections by double-digit margins, sometimes by more than 20 points. They expect to lose the midterms handily, and it’s got Trump so upset that he’s enlisting his entire administration, and as many Senate Republicans as he can strong-arm, into supporting efforts to steal or compromise the fairness of the election.
And yet…
If you ask people which party they’d like to see in control of Congress, you’ll get the impression that voters were much less down on Trump and the GOP than approval polling suggests. Nate Silver has Democrats up 5.5 points in the generic ballot. G. Elliott Morris has them up by a similar six point margin in his most recent poll.
That’s not bad exactly, but it also isn’t awe-inspiring. It’s consistent with a nice Democratic House majority, though not a historically large one, and continued Republican control of the Senate. A “good showing” rather than the kind of midterm waves (1994, 2006, 2010) that we associate with immense public backlash and come to view as watershed moments.
Not that Democrats ever sleep easy, but this consistent finding has them especially rattled.
Strangely, I read this as mostly good news, given the alternative. You can only make sense of the conflicting signals by assuming either that strong Democratic performance in actual elections is an illusion, or that their generic ballot share is being dragged down by something that doesn’t manifest in practice, at the ballot box.
I strongly suspect it’s the latter. But the stakes of the question are actually quite high. If Democrats are determined to resolve this paradox, it’s critical that they analyze it correctly. Otherwise, they risk bringing the numbers into alignment the wrong way. Not by improving their generic ballot numbers, but by performing worse in elections.
Cards on the table, I think Democrats are poised to win in a big landslide. Let’s bracket for now the question of MAGA election subversion. We’ll return to it, because it’s an important part of the emerging picture as I see it. But in a free and fair fight, Dems would be cruising to a historic victory. They could change nothing, poll meh, and still romp. ...