A number that should terrify every Republican on the ballot this fall

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/generic-ballot-house-democrats-republicans/index.html

An 11 point margin in terms of the Generic Poll is tremendous. In 2018, the final average of the Generic Polling was 7-8 points depending on whether you use RCP or 538. Democrats picked up 40 seats in the House and ~390 seats at all levels of federal, state, and local government.

A lot has changed over the last five months and thus it is a bad idea to try and predict what will happen five months from now, but the generic polling combines with the Biden vs Trump head to head polling and combines with Trump's approval rating and combines with the Democrat's massive funding advantage to suggest that Republicans are in for a bad day.

 

As my son said to me the day after the 2012 election, "Dad, I guess we underestimated just how collectively stupid the American people are"

 

People's faith in the polls since 2016 just make me laugh. Carry on if it makes you smile.

 

People not being able to comprehend polling margins make me sad that our public education system has failed so many families.

 

The final average of the polls in 2016 was accurate to within 1.1%.

The final average of the polls in 2018 was accurate to within 0.3%.

Keep laughing.

 

CNN reporting on a NBC poll? Yeah to totally fake news and bias

 

This does not surprise me in the least.

With the economy in the toilet there is nothing that the GOP has to turn this around either.

 

Let's check the average of the polls then:





Would you like a reminder of the final average of the polls for the generic ballot before that blue wave crushed you guys in 2018? It was 8.7 for 538 (they have it at 8.4 right now) and 7.3 for RCP (they have it at 7.8 right now)

 

Totally messed up by the bias NBC and Monomoth polls....can't be trusted.

 

It doesn't take much to get swing voters to swing.

Plague and economic woes are more than enough.

He's also bleeding moderate Republicans, suburban women hate him.

The cheating will be historic...

 

Wouldn't be surprising to see Republicans lose, perhaps massively, in the House and Senate. It also wouldn't be surprising to see Trump win reelection. That would merely be a repeat of the "Obama experience", only in reverse for the parties.

Democrats lost more power under Obama than under any president in decades. That makes it easier to win seats back.

Regardless of media trying to prop up Obama every day as if he hung the moon (to the same extreme that they try to destroy Trump), Obama was not a very popular president.

Obama won reelection largely because Republican primary voters screwed up royally and chose Mitt Romney. This year, Democrats have chosen Joe Biden. LOL



Trump v Obama approval:








https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...complished-policy-goals-party-floundered.html

 

There is another factor to consider that was in place BEFORE the Pandemic. Out of all of the different demographic groups in the electorate the Racist-in-Chief was ONLY ahead among non-college whites. That demographic is going to shrink by 4% between 2016 and 2020. Doing the math results in the net loss of 1.2 million votes in 2020. Even when the economy was still doing OK those lost votes were not being made up elsewhere.

So it is the perfect crap show for the GOP, there is no support outside of his base and Independents who lean Republican are the most likely to either abstain or vote Dem instead.

Even if we assume that the DOW recovers that does not equate to an economic recovery and new jobs replacing those that were lost.

 

Trump, as we've said before, will defeat Trump. He is his own worst enemy. More evidence on his quote after seeing the Buffalo video of the shoving incident.

"Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old ... was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?"

 

The GOP's Racist-in-Chief has LOST them almost half of those seats in the last 3 elections.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/06/election-years-under-trump-decisive-gop-losses/

So the GOP is LOSING all of that power under the Racist-in-Chief and it looks like the rest of those GOP gains will be WIPED OUT this November.

Sad!

 

The American political pendulum swings left and right fairly predictably. There is nothing new under the sun.

 

I'm fortunate ( I guess) , neither of my senators are up this term, my house rep is but my county is 70%+ red, so I could write in bugs bunny and whoever the GOP nominee is will get the job. My mind is made up on potus, so I can basically cruise through this election without much thought or consideration. Perhaps there will be some amendment worth reading or city council positions that I can devote more than 5 minutes of research to....

As far as predictions, I wouldn't venture to make a guess at this point, perhaps later this year there will be better indications.

 

How about Emerson?

 

A few points here:

A) Never rely on one poll or the poll from one source. Use the average of the polls and Trump has consistently and dramatically underperformed relative to pretty much every single President in modern US history. In fact, the only President to have as high of a disapproval rating as Trump has at this point in their Presidency is George H.W. Bush (who lost). The only other President in modern history to have a greater than 50% disapproval rating at this point in their Presidency was Carter (who also lost).



B) The seats lost by Obama were over the course of three elections. Trump has been in office for one. And during that one election, the GOP lost around 390 seats, which is definitely ahead of the pace of Obama. Plus, Trump's losses happened while the economy was going very well (something that definitely was not the case for Obama's first two elections). So the primary explainer is Trump and his impact on the downballot.

C) The natural pendulum swings of US politics is real, but you can also look to exit polling to determine what role the President has on the downballot and in 2018, the "send a message of support/disapproval for Trump" was a primary motivator in 2/3rds of the voters.

 

Yep. Mid-terms definitely send a signal. Politics is very repetitive.

 

I understand the desire to normalize Trump's losses, but why keep referencing Obama? George HW and Carter both loss fewer seats and then lost their re-election bid. The others who lost more and less all won their re-election bids, so that metric in isolation is not very predictive at all.

 

Obama and Trump as two of the most divisive presidents, and obviously the two most recent, make for a good comparison. For eight Obama years, a lot of comparisons were made between Obama and G.W. Bush. It's fairly normal to compare a current president with the most recent predecessor.

The trend with other presidents to lose seats in the mid-terms, whether large are small losses, is simply illustrative of the fairly normal historical patterns.

 

True.

We can make comparisons with Trump and Carter as well.
Carter actually had higher GDP averages than Trump but crashed with oil crisis/hostage mess.
Trump started with a good economy, but may crash with the Covid/Recession mess.
The Atlanta Fed Reserve Bank is estimating a 53% drop in GDP numbers for the second quarter of 2020. To put that
in perspective, the worst quarter during the last recession was negative 8%.

Trump had three years of no major crisis to deal with - he was lucky. Welcome to the real world, Mr. Trump.

 

In terms of divisiveness, which you should identify based on "will never support" vs "will always support," Trump is definitely in a league of his own. But this thread is about looking forward to the fall. So unless you have a reason for using Obama's performance or record as a method for predicting Trump's, then the comparison seems largely irrelevant.

 

Hmmmm. One might properly wonder if you anticipated the above quoted complaint, and left this bullet sitting in the chamber, as you sat dozing in your rocking chair on the front porch, just waiting for the outlaws to show up.

 

The chart showing Obama's approval at the same point in time, and the fact that he won election, is relevant.

The charts showing that losing Congressional seats during mid-terms and presidents' second terms are also relevant.

History is a relevant and somewhat more reliable predictor of future events than a single poll five months out from an election.

Fair enough if you have a different view of relevancy. We can disagree on that.