Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Red wave 2.0??

Democrats are fighting the fights they think they can win, but are they fighting the fights that need fighting? Right now Democrats are offering a two pronged approach to the 2022 midterms. Abortion and pushing the extreme MAGA Republican theme (generally tying them to Jan 6th). While this might be something that excites the small sliver of the ultra-left liberal Democrat, the question is whether or not it resonates with anyone else. Does the American public trust Democrats on Abortion? Sure. Do some people still care about Jan 6th? Sure. But are those really "important" issues for the swing voters who come out and move the needle in the battleground districts?

Every poll that comes out on the subject of what Americans are really concerned about shows that the economy, inflation, crime, and the border are at the top of the heap. Abortion barely hits the top five and sometimes is even lower than that depending on how specific you break up the economic issues. Oh, and while some may still be interested in Jan 6th, almost nobody says it is something that will affect their vote in November. 

So it appears that the Democrats have figured out which issues that they "win" on and are concentrating their entire effort on those subjects. At this point in time Democrats (and liberal advocacy groups) have spent a small fortune on abortion based ads. By some measures, they have spent more money on abortion ads than the GOP and conservatives have spent overall. Meanwhile the rhetoric from top Democrats (such as the President) has been designed to paint the GOP as a Party of extremists who apparently want to use violence to get their way (even as 95% of all political violence comes from the left).  

While this strategy "appears" to have blunted some of the GOP momentum in the polling, that same polling is starting to slip away from the Democrats. I suspect it will slip even further as pollsters move away from the registered voter polls and into the likely voter samples. More importantly, the GOP appears well ahead in the actual competitive districts which is where the election will be determined. 

Right now the GOP is favored to win the House. Depending on who you are watching the projection show that they will squeak by and win a small majority or they have a good chance to win 2-3 dozen seats. The Senate has been a different story. As it stands, RCP (Sean Trende) shows the most likely result to be Republicans picking up two seats. While 538 (Nate Silver) has Democrats with a 68% chance to keep at least 50 seats. Of course in typical Nate Silver form, he (for example) still shows Masto winning in Nevada in spite of not leading in a poll since the middle of August. Silver has stubbornly remained biased as a projectionist.  
 
Time will tell how this works out for the Democrats. But it appears that they have conceded the fights that they probably need to fight and are taking the approach that they would rather fight the fights that they can win (without much concern for if winning those fights will matter). 

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