Democrats 2018 Enthusiasm is Completely Gone

This story is actually from last week, but I missed it, and I'm hoping you did too, or else this comment thread is going to be pretty lame. (Or pretty interesting about off-topic matters.)

One of the biggest drivers of last year's 'blue wave' midterm election cycle was Democrats' double-digit advantage on the important metric of voter enthusiasm. Unsurprisingly, with Republicans in charge of the House, Senate and presidency, Democratic partisans were highly invested in turning out to break the GOP's electoral stranglehold on the federal government's levers of power. They exploited that edge to gain 40 House seats, half-a-dozen governorships, and hundreds of state-level legislative seats.

Per a (relatively) new NBC-WSJ poll, that enthusiasm edge is gone.

As a matter of fact, enthusiasm has shifted -- probably inside the margin of error and therefore not in a statistically meaningful way -- to the Republicans:

75 percent of Republican registered voters say they have high interest in the 2020 presidential election -- registering a "9" or "10" on a 10-point scale -- versus 73 percent of Democratic voters who say the same thing. That's quite a change from the 2018 cycle, when Democrats held a double-digit lead on this question until the last two months before the election, when the GOP closed the gap but still trailed the Dems in enthusiasm.

All Trump has to run on is the economy. The Democrats, on the other hand, get to run on the powerful issue of radical transgender theory.

posted by Ace of Spades at 03:38 PM

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