Looming Losses for House Democrats [Dave in Fla]

The 2022 election season is not going well for Democrats. Historical trends already point to significant losses in the House, where the Democrats only hold a 5 seat edge (as of last week). On historical trends alone, the Democrats would lose their majority. However, current polling is showing that if the election were today, the Democrats would face losses worse than the 1994 and 2010 losses.

Congressional generic ballot polling is a recent trend, only being conducted as a key part of election polling since 2012. Prior to that only a few polling firms, such as Washington Post/ABC and Gallup, polled the question. Prior to 1980, it wasn't polled at all.

The table below shows both the historical trends in the first year of a presidency, and the generic ballot results prior to the elections. With the exception of Bush in 2002, a president in his first midterm always loses seats in the House. Of the seven examples since 1970, the minimum loss has been 8 seats. Even without the current political climate, the Democrat hold on the House is almost certain to be lost.

The other thing to note about these polls is that they skew Democrat. It is very rare for them to show a Republican preference. The one time that they did, we had the 2010 blowout of 63 seats. I took a look at the historic performance of the ABC poll.

This poll does show a correlation to the results of the congressional elections. High numbers for the Democrats have predicted Democrats wins, low numbers for the Democrats have predicted Republican wins. Even in 2010 the ABC poll was showing a D+5 predicted result.

What is unprecedented is this poll is currently showing a R+10 result. The last time Republicans led on this question was September 2010, where they held a 1 point lead. And this poll could very well still be underreporting the Republican advantage. Rich Baris started polling congressional preference in September, finding a 1 point Republican advantage, where the ABC poll showed a 14 point Democrat advantage during the same time period.

It isn't just the ABC poll showing this result. Recent polls from Quinnipiac, Rasmussen, Suffolk, and Emerson are showing the same unprecedented Republican congressional ballot leads. Take a look at the RCP average over the last few months.

This graph shows three trend periods since the summer. From June until August, the Republicans were slowly gaining ground on the Democrats. Then with the passage of the Infrastructure bill in the Senate in September, congressional preference dropped like a rock for both parties. In October, the Republicans began to gain ground again, and then with the vaccine mandates hitting the entire national work force in November, Republicans took an unheard of lead.

If we had a normal electoral environment, we would be talking about gains of 80+ seats, and certainly equal to the 60+ seats gained in 2010. But these are not normal times, since hyper partisanship and election fraud are the current election constants. Election reforms in states like Florida, Georgia, and Texas will guarantee significant Republican wins in those states. Walker is very likely to beat Ossoff in Georgia, DeSantis will cruise to an easy win, Charlie Crist's seat will switch back to Republican, and Guillen in Texas saw the writing on the wall in the Hispanic community and switched parties.

In the past, we could also expect major swings in other states like California. However, with the institution of legalized ballot harvesting and universal mail-in ballots, the opportunity for fraud in that state (and others like Colorado) are so significant that candidates need to overcome much higher margins of fraud than before. Even so, districts like CA-16 are very competitive this year, where Biden won the district by over 10 points.

There is also a trend where incumbent Republicans are facing a tough primary campaign. This is where Trump's influence is being felt. The Trump endorsement is the Republican voters' top issue for supporting a candidate. Youngkin could not have won Virginia without it. In Georgia, polling showed that either Kemp or Jones would win with Trump's endorsement. Now that he has endorsed David Perdue, Perdue is leading. There are also candidates who were not interested in politics at all, until the election was stolen in 2020. Joe Kent in WA-3 is running against Jaime Beutler, who voted to impeach Trump. Vance in Ohio wouldn't be in the race at all. And Murkowski in Alaska is in serious trouble, even with the NSCC spending millions to help reelect her.

While the primary beneficiary of current voter anger is going to be the GOPe, who have done nothing except sell out their base for years, there will be winners who have deep populist convictions and will buck the status quo. There will be more Marjorie Green's and Lauren Boebert's next year.

Back in March a question was asked regarding the Democrat plans to win the midterms. The Democrats had planned to run on a booming economy and world stability.

Let that sink in.

After stealing the election, they really thought that the policies they were going enact would result in economic improvement, and that the world would settle down and love us. And the voters would then forget about 2020 and just return to pre-2016 voting patterns. To be fair, the voters were willing to do so, all the Biden Administration had to do was continue the Trump policies. Instead, they botched Afghanistan, we have unprecedented inflation, never ending COVID emergencies, massive supply chain disruption, and vaccine mandates threatening the jobs of millions right before Christmas.

Even the Never Trump neocons thought Democrat policies would lead to prosperity and peace.

We are ruled by idiots.

They have sown the wind and will reap the whirlwind. It's just a crying shame that the guy who will benefit the most is Kevin McCarthy.

posted by Open Blogger at 12:15 PM

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