Recent poll results have some on the left believing that Democrats still have a shot at keeping control of the Senate and perhaps even the House. But that glimmer of hope is very faint.
Sorry, Democrats. Don’t get your hopes up for the midterms.
Perhaps, but the history of undecided voters suggests that’s not likely. A late June Politico-Morning Consult poll shows that Biden had a net minus 12 percent job approval rating — 43 percent approved versus 55 percent who disapproved — while Democrats were ahead in the generic congressional ballot 45 to 42. That difference is largely due to two factors: Democrats who are unhappy with Biden who nevertheless support their party, and independents unhappy with Biden who are undecided for Congress. Only 79 percent of Democrats approve of Biden’s job performance, but 93 percent will vote for the party. Meanwhile a whopping 38 percent of independents are still undecided for Congress, even though 66 percent do not approve of Biden’s performance. The voters Democrats need to convince are not unhappy partisans; they are people with no party loyalties whatsoever.
These findings are replicated in virtually every other recent poll that publishes similar data. The most recent Economist-YouGov poll, for example, shows Biden underwater among independents by a 28-to-58 margin, while Democrats lead among them by only 34 to 32. The independents who are undecided, we can infer, are nearly uniformly unhappy with the president. The most recent NPR-Marist and Monmouth polls also show that the undecided vote comes almost entirely from independents who disapprove of Biden.
History shows that these voters tend to break sharply against the president’s party by Election Day. The exit polls from the last four midterm elections all show that independents voted against the president’s party by between 12 and 19 points. In each case, the president had a net negative job rating on Election Day. Is there any reason, given the sharply negative views people hold toward Biden and about the state of affairs in the United States today, to think this time will be different?
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FollowThen there’s the question of sample bias. A poll’s results are only as good as its ability to accurately reflect the demographic characteristics of the voting population. Each of the four midterm polls listed above has a sample in which Democrats outnumber Republicans by between four and 6.5 points. But the largest advantage the Democrats have in the last four midterms, according to exit polls, was four points, and that was in the Democratic wave year of 2018. Democrats only outnumbered Republicans by two points in the Democratic landslide of 2006, and Republicans either tied Democrats or led by one point in the GOP landslide years of 2010 and 2014. Democrats would be defying history if they were to significantly outnumber Republicans at the polls as their party leader dredged to such depths on unpopularity.
Polls are simply snapshots, and it’s possible that Biden will recover by the fall. It’s also possible that Democrats replicate Ronald Reagan’s performance in the 1982 midterms, when Republicans kept their Senate majority even though Reagan was deeply unpopular and the GOP lost 26 House seats and working control of that chamber. But it’s fair to say that with Democratic displeasure with Biden on the rise, few if any in his party think he’s likely to pull that miracle off.
Election prognostication this far off is a bit like weather forecasting: What appears to be a major storm could fizzle out as the front moves closer. But right now, it looks like a Category 5 political hurricane is taking form offshore. And it’s headed right toward Democratic central.
Source: WP
