How good that new poll is — and isn’t — for Democrats

“So, a lot can happen in 6 months,” Maloney said, pointing to a graph that showed Democrats erasing their 10-point deficit from November.

That much is certainly true. How much Democrats have truly begun climbing out of their hole — and could continue to do so over the next six months — isn’t quite so clear.

The first thing we can say is that the generic ballot, overall, hasn’t shown signs of shifting so markedly across all polls. FiveThirtyEight’s tracker of the generic ballot — asking “If the election were held today, would you prefer a generic Democrat or a generic Republican?” — has held relatively steady for months, with the GOP leading by between two and three points. And in fact, it’s most recent GOP advantage, of 2.7 points, is actually the highest to date.

In addition, while the Democrats gained 11 points on net in the Post-ABC poll between November (minus-10) and today (plus-1), an NPR/PBS Marist poll from last week showed quite the opposite. It showed Democrats going from up five points in November to down three points today — an eight-point swing toward the red team.

As The Post’s polling team noted, the shifts in the latest Post-ABC poll were also largely due to independent voters, who can be volatile from poll to poll. Indeed, just since February they went from favoring Republicans by 14 points to splitting evenly between the two parties. The Marist poll showed them going 12 points in the GOP’s direction over the last six months.

The Marist poll also shows how wild the shifts can be among some of these groups. When the poll was released last week, Republicans proudly pointed out that the GOP showed a remarkable 13-point advantage among Hispanic voters (who almost always favor Democrats) and a resounding 28-point lead among parents of children 18 and younger.

That last one certainly fit a narrative, given the GOP’s focus on instruction involving sexual orientation and gender identity in schools — and the supposedly pivotal role that school issues played in the GOP’s win in the Virginia governor’s race in 2021. But it seems highly implausible such a chasm has opened; even in that race, parents and non-parents voted approximately the same, as The Post’s Scott Clement noted at the time. And in the new Post-ABC poll, voters actually preferred Democrats on the issue of education, 47-39.

At the same time, there are suggestions that things might be getting better for Democrats — at least on a few counts. One is that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic appears to be fading. While most polls over the winter showed more people disapproving than approving of Biden on the virus, most polls now show him above water (he went from minus-10 in February to plus-8 in the Post-ABC poll). He’s also doing somewhat better on the situation in Ukraine, after initial reviews were strongly negative.

Those issues, of course, appear secondary to others in voters’ minds — namely the economy and inflation.

And there is no sign of Biden’s problems there going away, especially after new numbers on Friday showed the economy actually contracted over the past three months. The Post-ABC poll, which was conducted mostly before that news, showed voters disapproved of Biden by 19 points on the economy and by a whopping 40 points on inflation, 68 percent to 28 percent. When asked about which party would do better on inflation, voters picked Republicans 50-31.

There also remains a clear enthusiasm gap that should temper whatever gains Democrats might make on the generic ballot. Polls this far out test registered voters rather than likely ones, and likely ones seem as though they tilt more Republican. As The Post’s team wrote:

Despite the vanishing gap between the two sides on which party people say they will support in November, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents continue to say they are more certain to vote in November than Democrats, by a margin of 10 percentage points in the latest poll.

The last key point is that the generic ballot can be somewhat misleading when it comes to the eventual outcomes — because history shows Democrats need to be leading on that measure to keep their majorities. They have almost no room for error, by virtue of their effective 50-50 Senate majority and their nine-seat majority in the House. Certainly, smaller losses rather than massive ones could be seen as a win in November — especially given that the president’s party almost always loses significant ground in midterm elections. But even a generic ballot that is about even between the parties likely means that Republicans will take control of both chambers.

A lot could indeed happen over the next six months. But for now it seems Democrats’ biggest problems are pretty ingrained, and what remains to be seen is how bad November will be.