2022 Generic Ballot / Recruitment / Fundraising / Ratings Megathread

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Is Ashley Hinson DOA without Trump on the ballot? I could see the Fink  receiving only 150k votes but still beating her tbh imo

Depends on how many motorcycle tours the Fink does. She kinda slacked off this year (thus why she lost), but she's got two years to make up for it.

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There's casting a wide net, and there's thinking that districts which Biden won by huge margins are winnable. They obviously don't need these kinds of seats to win the House, and wave insurance is fine, but adding seats like IL-03, NY-20, and NY-26 is insane.

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I already know how this is going to end.

If polls continue underestimating Republicans:

"Of course DiAngelo-loving red avatar HACKS bought the polls! I told you all that polls would still have a Republican bias and NO ONE believed me. Pathetic." (even if less than a quarter of Democrats believe the polls)

"Clearly this was just a backlash against (insert news cycle here), and Democrats would've overperformed their polls if not for that. We'll see that come true in 2024."

If polls are accurate or even underestimate Democrats:

"The junky polls may have happened to be right THIS time, but they were better in 2018 than in 2016, and we saw how that worked out in 2020. Red avatars shouldn't get so cocky."

"I KNEW it was just a Trump effect, and of course blue avatar hacks didn't believe me! Their tears are so sweet, and I'll look forward to tasting them again in 2024 when they insist that the polls are wrong only for them to underestimate Democrats!"

This game gets old.

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What? Did someone say polls overestimated Democrats in 2020? Funny, I've NEVER heard anyone bring that up before! And what's that, Democrats live in a "bubble"? What an interesting, unique, and fresh perspective! I'll definitely reassess my political analysis and leanings as a result of such riveting and cutting-edge political commentary.

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Generic Ballot, North Carolina

GCB: R+1
Republican 47% (n/c)
Democratic 46% (n/c)
Unsure 6% (n/c)

Biden approval: 48/49 (-1)

The meme should have always been Titanium Tilt R NC, not FL!

It is now, they just switched places, now FL is Titanium Lean R. Here are my predictions for 2022 and 2024:

NC-SEN 2022
McCrory 48.6%
Jackson 47.2%

NC-PRES 2024
Trump 49.8%
Biden 48.6%

NC-GOV 2024
Bishop 48.8%
Manning 47.5%

BONUS: NC-SEN 2026
If Biden wins:
Tills 48.7%
Ross 47.3%

If a Republican wins:
Tillis 48.6%
Ross 47.4%

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You tell them, King!

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My guess is that the PV will be more like R+2 than R+5-6, but the results in the Senate/House might look like a wave, since it would mean Republicans are taking the House by a decent margin and flipping the Senate, albeit more narrowly.

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This would be like someone stubbing their toe on January 1st, 2020 due to being drunk, and then proclaiming that it means 2020 will be a terrible year.

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Republicans are going to do well in 2022, but they can thank the Democrats for being bad at messaging and voters for reflexively taking out their anger on the incumbent party than anything that they're doing. If Democrats were better at responding to a platform that basically consists of "Trump good! Socialism bad! CRT bad!", Republicans would have less representation in Congress than they had after 2008.

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Liberals are so used to winning

HAHAHAHAHA, good one.

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Monmouth has R+7

50
43

Abortion went from 9% to 25% as far as most important issue. Amazing how wrong the punditry continues to be on this.

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1522608091027623936

Liberals are so used to winning they can't understand this is exactly how conservatives felt through most of 2020 (but especially the summer). But nobody made that argument in favor of Republicans then.

Well to be fair , the summer of 2020 probably did reduce the size of the democratic win so I’m not sure if this a great point to make if we are talking about electoral impact

Everybody seems to think this now but I don't think that's actually accurate. Why is it that during the summer of 2020, Biden and Democrats had their largest polling leads, and Trump had his lowest approval? It's understandable to think this in retrospect to explain how badly wrong the expectations were. But at the time that defunding the police was becoming trendy, it wasn't exactly helping Republicans, and everybody here thought the general unease in the country would hurt Trump (it did) even if some of their antics backfired.

Btw, I'm not totally sold on the idea that it won't help Democrats at all. It will probably juice their turnout a bit. But it won't fix their core issues, which have to with Biden and the economy.

Liberals are so used to winning

HAHAHAHAHA, good one.

Well yeah, these last few months haven't exactly been great for the left. And that's why the reaction has been what it's been. When you're not used to losing, it hurts. From the end of the 2016 election all the way to late 2021, the left has broadly won the culture and the political battles, and ideologically captured nearly every institution in American life, with the only exception being the Supreme Court?

How much you want to bet, as soon as this decision actually comes down, if it even comes down the way everybody's assuming it will, that big corporations everywhere will put out statements condemning the court decision, claiming it's an attack on women's rights, and providing financial cover for abortion expenses? We still haven't found the leaker apparently, which speaks volumes.

The Democratic Party won some victories in 2018 and to an extent in 2020, though to say that the left is in control of any institution is to either greatly misunderstand what the left is, or move the goalposts very far to the right. Institutions are somewhat favorable to corporate Democrats (so long as they vow not to fundamentally change the status quo much), but are probably more hostile to the actual left than they are to Trump, with the 2016 and 2020 primaries being prime examples of this. And much of Biden's presidency has been anything but victorious for the left. He was already an enormous compromise for us, and even his watered down agenda has been all but derailed.

If the networks do this, it is for ratings, not because they truly "support" the left. They love a good conflict more than anything, and if Democrats were to, say, strengthen gun control, we'd never hear the end about how much they were tearing America apart and showing that they don't care about "real Americans."

As a left-winger, I am so unused to winning that it almost feels weird when my ideology actually scores something resembling a victory.

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Monmouth has R+7

50
43

Abortion went from 9% to 25% as far as most important issue. Amazing how wrong the punditry continues to be on this.

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1522608091027623936

Liberals are so used to winning they can't understand this is exactly how conservatives felt through most of 2020 (but especially the summer). But nobody made that argument in favor of Republicans then.

Well to be fair , the summer of 2020 probably did reduce the size of the democratic win so I’m not sure if this a great point to make if we are talking about electoral impact

Everybody seems to think this now but I don't think that's actually accurate. Why is it that during the summer of 2020, Biden and Democrats had their largest polling leads, and Trump had his lowest approval? It's understandable to think this in retrospect to explain how badly wrong the expectations were. But at the time that defunding the police was becoming trendy, it wasn't exactly helping Republicans, and everybody here thought the general unease in the country would hurt Trump (it did) even if some of their antics backfired.

Btw, I'm not totally sold on the idea that it won't help Democrats at all. It will probably juice their turnout a bit. But it won't fix their core issues, which have to with Biden and the economy.

Liberals are so used to winning

HAHAHAHAHA, good one.

Well yeah, these last few months haven't exactly been great for the left. And that's why the reaction has been what it's been. When you're not used to losing, it hurts. From the end of the 2016 election all the way to late 2021, the left has broadly won the culture and the political battles, and ideologically captured nearly every institution in American life, with the only exception being the Supreme Court?

How much you want to bet, as soon as this decision actually comes down, if it even comes down the way everybody's assuming it will, that big corporations everywhere will put out statements condemning the court decision, claiming it's an attack on women's rights, and providing financial cover for abortion expenses? We still haven't found the leaker apparently, which speaks volumes.

The Democratic Party won some victories in 2018 and to an extent in 2020, though to say that the left is in control of any institution is to either greatly misunderstand what the left is, or move the goalposts very far to the right. Institutions are somewhat favorable to corporate Democrats (so long as they vow not to fundamentally change the status quo much), but are probably more hostile to the actual left than they are to Trump, with the 2016 and 2020 primaries being prime examples of this. And much of Biden's presidency has been anything but victorious for the left. He was already an enormous compromise for us, and even his watered down agenda has been all but derailed.

If the networks do this, it is for ratings, not because they truly "support" the left. They love a good conflict more than anything, and if Democrats were to, say, strengthen gun control, we'd never hear the end about how much they were tearing America apart and showing that they don't care about "real Americans."

As a left-winger, I am so unused to winning that it almost feels weird when my ideology actually scores something resembling a victory.

I actually agree. The populist/hard-left Bernie Sanders wing has been thoroughly defeated, even more so than either the establishment or Trump-aligned right. As a result, they're so insignificant as far as their political influence that I end up saying "the left" a lot referring to establishment Democrats and their allies, which is most of the Democratic Party, and nearly all of their institutional influences. You call them corporate Democrats, but that's what I'm referring to when I say the left, because like it or not they have been dominant with little dissent among their own ranks (in comparison to Republicans). The problem here is even progressives like Elizabeth Warren haven't differentiated themselves that much from this element. It's only the squad and the Sanders folks.

However, I don't buy at all that they're more hostile to Sanders than Trump. And I don't buy that harsher gun control would get negative coverage anywhere other than Fox News and the minority of right-leaning outlets. I watch MSNBC and CNN every once in a while. They are pure Democratic Party propaganda still pretending like they're objective news. You can tell every time they have to cover Biden's approval it's this attitude that people are too ungrateful to see how well Biden is doing.

My point is that there is a decent portion of the population that is to the left of the Democratic establishment, and that to us, they are not significantly left-wing or sufficiently different from the Republican Party, and it's important to make that distinction, even if the divide isn't (yet) 50/50 among those who might be on the left half of the population in terms of ideology. I would agree that Warren and even Jayapal have not done enough to pull the party away from its current course, though they may simply realize how outnumbered they are in Congress.

I agree that MSNBC is basically in the bag for the Democratic establishment, though CNN seems much more concerned with just generating views. That's not me defending CNN, however, I think that they're a complete joke. Perhaps they're hostile to Trump, though I wouldn't say that they're particularly or consistently hostile to the Republican establishment, though. And the hostility to Trump is not coming from a desire to help Democrats. It's because they realize how much attention Trump generates, and thus pointing out how "controversial" or "unprecedented" he is happens to be a great way for them to get more views, and in turn, money.

Either way, the media and Twitter are not good gauges of how the left really feels. I'm one of many who are increasingly happy with the Democratic Party, and even many I know that initially supported Biden or preferred him to Sanders believe he's been a disappointment, and that his presidency has certainly not been a "win" for the left. And seeing Democrats who actively despise people like me described as left-wing or being put in the same ideological category as them is certainly not a good feeling, either.

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So we’ve gone back from “GCB will be far more Republican than 2010” to “atypical midterm/2002 redux”, then? Got it.

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I think a small shift toward the Democrats is plausible, but it’s too soon to be concluding that Democrats are now in good shape. I think left-leaning voters becoming somewhat more engaged was inevitable, thus why I never bought WA-SEN being competitive, and I do think there’s an upper limit to how well Republicans can do and that they’ll surely leave at least a few competitive races on the table, but the fundamentals are still really bad for Democrats. The Republican Party hasn’t been popular in its own right in quite some time, but that hasn’t stopped them from being quite successful, since their strategy has always been to paint the Democrats and the left as “dangerous.”

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DDHQ moves NC-SEN to tossup: https://twitter.com/DecisionDeskHQ/status/1559213501008056325

NC being a Toss-Up while WI is Likely R is some galaxy-brain level analysis.

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DDHQ moves NC-SEN to tossup: https://twitter.com/DecisionDeskHQ/status/1559213501008056325

NC being a Toss-Up while WI is Likely R is some galaxy-brain level analysis.

It's possible they're waiting for this week's Marquette poll for any (potential) rating changes in WI.

WI is only one rating to the right of where I’d put it (Lean R), and I can see a case for Likely R. NC definitely does not belong two ratings to the left of WI, though.

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Yes, Doomers were so correct that Trump had the 2020 election in the bag, and that 2018 was going to be a bad year for Democrats… Oh wait.

It’s one thing to say “take the polls with a grain of salt. They could be wrong or Republicans could gain again and have a good year after all.” That’s a perfectly reasonable take, and I’m guessing one of those two things ends up being the case.

It’s another entirely to act as though you’re positive everything will go wrong, mock anyone who go disagrees, bump threads mocking optimistic predictions while not admiring your mistakes and adjusting for them in any meaningful way. This is why Doomers are so insufferable. The persistence and (unearned) overconfidence makes it hard to take them seriously. And saying that Doomers were “almost right” in 2020 is like saying those of us sure that Bevin would win in 2019 were “almost right” or would’ve been right if Bevin had won by 0.1%. Being concerned about the possibility of bad results or merely thinking they will happen is one thing. Insisting that they will and that it’s absurd to predict otherwise is something else entirely.

Predicting multiple cycles should teach anyone that the only thing anyone can predict with confidence is that being overconfident about your predictions is a sure fire way to end up with egg on your face, sooner or later.

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Yes, Doomers were so correct that Trump had the 2020 election in the bag, and that 2018 was going to be a bad year for Democrats… Oh wait.

It’s one thing to say “take the polls with a grain of salt. They could be wrong or Republicans could gain again and have a good year after all.” That’s a perfectly reasonable take, and I’m guessing one of those two things ends up being the case.

It’s another entirely to act as though you’re positive everything will go wrong, mock anyone who go disagrees, bump threads mocking optimistic predictions while not admiring your mistakes and adjusting for them in any meaningful way. This is why Doomers are so insufferable. The persistence and (unearned) overconfidence makes it hard to take them seriously. And saying that Doomers were “almost right” in 2020 is like saying those of us sure that Bevin would win in 2019 were “almost right” or would’ve been right if Bevin had won by 0.1%. Being concerned about the possibility of bad results or merely thinking they will happen is one thing. Insisting that they will and that it’s absurd to predict otherwise is something else entirely.

Predicting multiple cycles should teach anyone that the only thing anyone can predict with confidence is that being overconfident about your predictions is a sure fire way to end up with egg on your face, sooner or later.

Except the bloomers(including myself) mocked people too. They dismissed and were outright hostile towards anyone who didn't believe 2020 would be another d wave year

Sure, but that doesn’t make the attitude of the Doomers any better. Honestly, I think everyone could afford to acknowledge that we don’t know exactly what will happen, and that people are free to make predictions we don’t think are likely to pan out.

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Perhaps they’re being overconfident, November will tell us that for sure. But complacent to me suggests not doing much campaigning and/or sitting on competitive races, which definitely does not describe them. While they were overconfident in 2020, I’d say that 2016 is the only year that they were truly complacent, in that they took competitive races for granted.

Honestly, at least until recently, Republicans are the ones who seemed complacent and overconfident that historical precedent would guarantee a red wave regardless of how far they went. 2022 still might be a red wave, but that’s far less of a given than some Republicans seem to think, and the special election results should make them at least a little nervous, as well as the lack of campaigning by some Republicans. If Democrats were gaining in the spring rather than the late summer, it’d be easier to dismiss.