2022 Generic Ballot / Recruitment / Fundraising / Ratings Megathread

[Brittain33]

Is he the first openly gay DCCC chair?

[Brittain33]

Is he the first openly gay DCCC chair?

Yes.

That's exciting. I don't normally care about these roles but it might mean some interesting recruitment.

[Brittain33]

He’s a school board President in a town of 10,000 people. He’s barely above Some Guy.

[Brittain33]

My Hopium is wearing off with all the Dems jumping ship so early in the cycle.

[Brittain33]

My Hopium is wearing off with all the Dems jumping ship so early in the cycle.

I was saying it’s hard to be optimistic that Dems will hold the House when so many incumbents are acting as if they believe they won’t.

[Brittain33]

Since 2022 will almost certainly be a red wave year, Kelly and Warnock are clear underdogs. Deal with it.

Does Herschel Walker strike you as a powerhouse?

[Brittain33]

At any rate, given the midterm climate, reapportionment shifts and once the GOP redraws the suburbs since they're no longer GOP strongholds like in 2011, Democrats losing a dozen seats seems perfectly realistic even if we win by the same PV margin as in 2020.

But this 2020 scenario has only really come to pass in Georgia. In Texas, Arizona, North Carolina the blue districts have gotten much lighter blue but very few have flipped.

[Brittain33]

This blows and “messaging” isn’t going to change it.

[Brittain33]

The only thing that is likely to help the Dems now is a massive shift in abortion policy toward prohibition after a Supreme Court case.

[Brittain33]

The only thing that is likely to help the Dems now is a massive shift in abortion policy toward prohibition after a Supreme Court case.

That probably wouldn't help them much. 2016 and to a lesser extent 2020 showed that people don't vote based on abortion policy. For 2016 was the election to save Roe v. Wade, and Democrats dropped the ball, losing to Donald effing Trump of all people.

I agree that it hasn’t helped Dems in the past, but I think abortion literally becoming illegal in ~20 states and Republicans proposing national Prohibitionist laws with the approval of the Supreme Court is a new scenario which will open wallets and get volunteers on the streets.

[Brittain33]

It's hard to think of a social or cultural issue that has less of an impact on voting behavior than abortion.

That view seems inconsistent with the behavior of the parties on this issue and their choice to repeatedly campaign and legislate on the issue at the state level.

[Brittain33]

Damn!

https://twitter.com/DKElections/status/1446490488819830786

Money doesn’t buy votes. Case and point, Beto and McGrath

Beto got way more votes than any Democrat in Texas history, even accounting for recent population growth.

[Brittain33]

If the tweeted map on the latest page of the NJ redistricting thread is accurate, we need to be on watch for a Chris Smith retirement.

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=366451.0

[Brittain33]

If the tweeted map on the latest page of the NJ redistricting thread is accurate, we need to be on watch for a Chris Smith retirement.

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=366451.0

The new map is different, however it still draws Chris Smith's home out of the 4th. Curious if he retires.

[Brittain33]

How does YouGov/the Economist actually have a D +9 generic ballot? That is such a glaring error that one would think they would make efforts to change their methodology to achieve more realistic results. Their approval numbers for Biden are reasonable, so why is the GCB so extreme. How are they sampling so many Biden disapprove/congressional Dem supporting people?

Is it worse than the Rasmussen R+10 from a while back? I don't think so. Just because it does not line up with your priors it does not make it wrong. That having been said D+9 is probably an outlier IMO but like all polls it should be thrown in the average.

Yes, it is. Nothing right now supports the idea of Dems even slightly winning the national popular vote.

I agree that D+9 doesn’t make sense, but Biden’s approvals have rebounded marginally in the last month.

[Brittain33]

She's still going to lose. If that NJ Senate leader could lose to a truck driver who spent $150 on his campaign, Cortez Masto will lose to Laxalt.

Oh please.

[Brittain33]

Yes, Democrats should definitely pour tons of money into winning back the #populists of IA-1 and IA-2 who will totally snap back to 2012 voting patterns without Trump on the ballot.

Those districts have been competitive a lot more recently than 2012.

[Brittain33]

The burden is on abc/WAPO to explain why the hell the GB went from R+10 to D+1

Are you asking them to unskew one of the polls?

[Brittain33]

Marist finds D+7 after Dobbs.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/27/1107733632/poll-majorities-oppose-supreme-courts-abortion-ruling-and-worry-about-other-righ

It seems like the argument that “everybody already knows how they feel about abortion, nothing will change, red tsunami incoming” doesn’t work well when the legal status of abortion changes dramatically and becomes illegal in half of the country.

[Brittain33]

Extremely relevant to the "Dobbs will change everything narrative": https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3543728-55-percent-oppose-supreme-court-roe-decision-poll/

• Dobbs opposed by a divided 55 to 45 percent majority
• but most would not have continued Roe/Casey's 23-week viability standard and would favor reducing it to 15 weeks, as in much of Europe
• and only 10 percent support the most liberal abortion policies permitting termination through the third trimester
• widest public support would have been for Justice Roberts’ position to revisit viability standard
• voters think state legislatures are the best forums to decide abortion policy (44%) followed by Congress (31%) and the Court (25%)

The truth is that Roe was never popular once people knew what it really said. The early polling was largely from the false belief, still persistent in some of the more ignorant circles, that the Court outlawed abortion. Thus the contradiction in high support for what Dobbs actually does versus the decision as a symbol.

If anything, the devastatingly low support for extreme NJ and CO-style abortion deregulation affirms my hunch Democrats might unexpectedly face some blowback in those states' legislatures.

The problem is that people aren’t affected by the Dobbs decision, they are affected by the 100% bans or almost-complete bans passed by Republican legislatures that are enabled by Dobbs, and that terrifies people. What Dobbs “actually does” is enable extreme legislation.

15 weeks may be more popular than 23 weeks, but Republicans are offering 6 weeks or 0 weeks and making the case that an ectopic pregnancy means a woman should die because she should have kept her legs closed. That’s not popular.

[Brittain33]

Monmouth tied at 47-47, was R+4 in May

https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_070522/


Harvard-Harris also tied at 50-50

https://harvardharrispoll.com/key-results-june/

Those are not good Polls for Democrats see above. Issues matter here!

According to Monmouth if you combine Inflation (33 %), Gas Prices (15 %) and Economy (9 %) you get 57 % which favours Republicans.

It says “what is the biggest concern facing your family right now.” Framing matters. Not hard to imagine that far more than 5% of voters are freaking out about abortion bans even though it’s not an issue facing their family right now.

[Brittain33]

Even 538 acknowledges that midterms are simultaneously both more republican and more “anti-incumbent” than the usual electorate

Really? I don’t think you can argue that 2018 was more Republican than either 2016 or 2020. Can you make that case?

Historically it has been the case that Republicans voted more reliably, but with large numbers of highly-educated Republicans moving away from the party and being replaced with lower-education voters, we could see that trend change.

Republicans benefit from the anti-incumbent factor so far but voters may have started to realize that on some issues, the incumbent President is Clarence Thomas rather than Joe Biden.

[Brittain33]

Well, we will find out. I am curious about the Dobbs effect. History argues for pessimism among Dems.

[Brittain33]

What is the change for Morning Consult/Politico?

[Brittain33]

I asked this twice for the people on here fully trusting generic ballot and arguing that 2020 doesn’t prove that the underestimation is systematic. Nobody has a good answer for it. The “environment” had to be something like R+8 at that time in order for those results to have happened. You can argue that Virginia and New Jersey had some unique state-specific issues, but it was also all over the country in local elections such as R’s easily winning Jacksonville/Duval and the Long Island races. The generic ballot at the time was literally a D lead

You simply can not use state election results to gauge a federal political environment. State candidates can delink themselves from the national party more effectively than senate candidates. Does anyone believe that Dem wins in KY and LA meant that Dem senators would have won those states if elections happened in off years? I don’t think so.

Is there some correlation? Probably. Youngkin doesn’t win in 2017, for example. But you absolutely can’t make an apples to apples comparison to national GCB.