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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Where Democrats stand roughly a month before the midterms:
The Good:
Republicans are continuing to play triage, and cutting off funding to House incumbents they believe are a lost cause
. In recent weeks they cut off funds to 4 such incumbents, with another 4 expected to be cut off any time now. When you scratch the surface of who has been cut off, it looks worse still for Republicans:
Republicans strategists have said that there are at least a dozen seats in the House they believe are simply indefensible
. That more than half of the 23 Democrats need to retake the House. Cook Political Reports, one of the definitive elections forecasters, believes 68 Republican seats up for election in 2018 as vulnerable, up from just 39 when they first started forecasting for the midterm elections.
There is hope that polls and ballot forecasts continue undercounting young people and new voters. A lot of forecasting draws not just on polls, but on historical evidence of how certain groups vote. With those under 30, midterm voting is often as low as 20%.
Democrats are continuing to either hang tough or to lead in a lot of red/purple state Senate races. Many are much too close to call at the moment, but the fact that in states like Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia and Montana that they're doing that well is continuing to give hope for the unlikely chance of either flipping the Senate, or at least not letting Republicans pad their numbers any more.
Lastly, despite Republicans closing the gap recently, Democrats continue to have a significant lead in the generic ballot. (The "Would you prefer a generic Democrat or Republican in office" question.)
The Bad:
Republicans are rallying around the Supreme Court. As unpopular as Kavanaugh is in general, a majority or Republicans still want him on the court even if he did assault women. And it is driving a new rash of enthusiasm for the midterm elections that had been missing. To wit:
Up until last week, only 68% of Republicans had said the midterms were a very important election, compared to 82% of Democrats. Now 80% of Republicans rate it as very important, negating the enthusiasm gap Democrats had been enjoying until now
. Also until that point, men had been about equally split between Dems and Reps, while women gave Democrats a 20 point lean. Now men are favoring Republicans by 10 points while women are staying relatively consistent.
Above all, these women, and the women they know, are ready to lash out against Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.
Nearly all the women I spoke with are plugged into state- and local-level conservative politics. Their collective, overwhelming sense is that, like Howard, women voters are angry about what’s happening to Kavanaugh. “I’ve got women in my church who were not politically active at all who were incensed with this,” says Melody Potter, the chairwoman of the West Virginia Republican Party—the first woman to hold that position, she made sure to point out. In her state, the stakes of the Kavanaugh scandal are immense: Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is fighting for his seat in a place where more than two-thirds of voters supported Donald Trump in 2016. With voters “energized” to elect people “who are going to support President Trump,” Potter says, West Virginians are closely watching how Manchin acts on Kavanaugh—especially now that the situation has become so politicized.
Organizers in other states say they’ve been hearing the same thing. “People in Indiana are angry. They are mad. They are changing their mind,” says Jodi Smith, the Indianapolis-based state director for the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List. When Senator Joe Donnelly, another vulnerable Democrat who is up for reelection in November, declared late last week that he would vote against Kavanaugh, it “started a firestorm of epic proportions,” Smith says. From her perspective on the ground in a highly contested swing state, “this is one of the best things that could happen to us.”
It’s not yet clear whether the Kavanaugh affair will work to the GOP’s advantage; recent polling has not conclusively shown what women, for example, think about these allegations. “If the Republicans don’t get it together and make sure that he gets in there, that’s not going to help us,” says Howard, the Georgia RNC official. “What makes me mad at times about our party is we don’t stand up enough and say, ‘Enough of your shenanigans! We’re not putting up with this!’”
As the quoted section demonstrates, however, these are all people already deeply committed to the Republican party.
Lastly on this subject, even some Republicans turned off by Trump and the party's turn are talking about a backlash against Democrats because of the "unfair" way Kavanaugh and men are being treated. I've heard and read several such interviews with and articles by Trump skeptical Republicans expressing a renewed solidarity with the party over Kavanaugh's nomination.
Trump's popularity is slowly improving from some of its recent lows, the 538 aggregate had him 14 points underwater about a month ago, (mean 14% more people had disapproved, say 54% disapproval to 40% approval) now that margin is below 11 points. Change that to likely or registered voters, and it drops to about a 9 point difference. If the midterms are a referendum on Trump, Democrats want him to be as unpopular as possible, and Trump is doing a good job of capitalizing on white male grievance and sticking his name on meaningless things (like the barely tweaked NAFTA deal) that make him look good. (Note: my favorite thing about this deal is that practically since he was elected, Trump railed about Canada's dairy market and how it was protected from foreign competition. Canada had accepted that they were going to open it up for the US in the TPP, which Trump scrapped. So he spent 2 years railing against our closest ally and burning bridges with tariffs to get them to agree to something they had already agreed to before he ever came on he scene, then touted Canada agreeing to open the dairy market as a historic victory. What a chump, no wonder he was such a shitty businessman. Hell of a con man and self-promoter though.)
As has been mentioned not too long ago upthread, the Senate seat of Senator Menendez in New Jersey has a fight on his hands, largely due to his corruption allegations. That said, polls are all over the place; some have Menendez up as much as 11 points, some as few as 2
. The Quinnipiac poll that has Menendez up 11 has a 4.1% margin of error, so the worst case would be Menendez is 4% lower than the poll expects and his opponent 4% higher, which would still give Menendez a narrow win. (Note: Quinnipiac University is one of the most respected polls in the country, earning an A- rating from 538.) The real bad news for Menendez however is his favorability rating: only about a third of voters view him favorably, while 53% have an unfavorable view of him. Those are bad numbers for an incumbent, and a good indication of one who is ripe to be picked off.
While a lot of red and purple state Senate races continue to feature Democrats performing strongly or being in toss up races, there is one looking pretty bad: Heidi Heitkamp, who made it into office in 2012 by the very narrowest of margins, is down as much as 10 points in some recent North Dakota polls.
The Weird:
Edited by TheWanderer on Oct 4th 2018 at 9:43:37 AM
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |![]()
White women in general, not Republican voters. Women as a whole are 55 percent opposed, 37% in support.
So what I'm saying is that you can't count on women voters to, as a bloc, reject Kavanaugh, everyone who voted for him and the Republican Party in general. It's just not happening - women can be every bit as shitty as men when it comes to supporting and normalizing sexual abuse.
Edited by Ramidel on Oct 4th 2018 at 2:48:55 AM
So basically we have a Morton's Fork?
A) Let Kavanaugh be confirmed. Republicans lose the House to Democrats in November, but Kavanaugh rules on the court for decades anyway.
B) Continue to oppose Kavanaugh. Republicans come out in droves for the midterms and keep the House. And Kavanaugh is probably confirmed eventually anyway.
Edited by speedyboris on Oct 4th 2018 at 6:44:32 AM
Not at all.
In the end as long as the Supreme Court is a headline issue Republicans will see a boost, because it’s an issue they care about more than Democrats.
There’s no way around this, this being an issue this close to the election is going to get the Republican base fired up, conformation or no conformation.
The only solution is to try and bury it under other issues, use the conformation to pull swing voters in the form of white women towards democrats, use other issues to boost democratic enthusiasm (remember we’re seeing a boost in democrats caring about the Supreme Court now) and simply push hard on turnout, it dosnt matter if the entire Republican Party turns out to vote if the entire Democratic Party also turns out to vote.
Also we have no indicator that the upswing in Republican enthusiasm is either enough to keep the house or caused purely by the hearings, remember the close we get to Election Day the higher enthusiasm is going to eb for everyone anyway. People may say they’re engaging because of this issue but they may just be using the headline to justify an engagement that would have happened anyway, if not for this they’d be explaining it with some other headline issue.
Edited by Silasw on Oct 4th 2018 at 11:52:34 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranSo what I'm saying is that you can't count on women voters to, as a bloc, reject Kavanaugh, everyone who voted for him and the Republican Party in general. It's just not happening - women can be every bit as shitty as men when it comes to supporting and normalizing sexual abuse.
55% opposed is a big deal and if they have high enthusiasm while the 37% have low enthusiasm (which is more than possible) then there could be major electoral consequences, so I think writing out women as a demographic is extremely preemptive. Those numbers are very encouraging.
Yeah if both Republicans and Democrats have high turnout then Democrats win, we lose when we don't vote and if we vote then they can't really stop us.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Oct 4th 2018 at 9:43:26 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangSome information from the Pew research center
Voter enthusiasm is at a record high (which is really good for the Democrats and really bad for the Republicans because our base is larger and our policies are more popular amongst the general population), 60% of voters say that voting in the midterms is an expression of support or opposition for Donald Trump (37% are against and 23% for).
They found that Democrats have several advantages.
-Democrats hold a 10 point lead in the generic ballot and about half of voters said that if the election was today they'd vote for a Democratic candidate.
-While enthusiasm is high amongst both parties (a fact that favors the Democrats for the reasons that I've said) it's higher amongst Republicans.
-67% of Democrats say they are more enthusiastic than normal about voting and 59% of Republican voters say that they're more enthusiastic than normal about voting.
-More Americans view the Democratic Party than the Republican Party as more concerned with regards to people's needs and more honest and ethical and more willing to work with the leaders of the other party.
The top issues for voters are the Supreme Court, Healthcare, and the economy. Strategically that benefits us because healthcare and economically Democratic policy are far more popular than Republican 'policy' (as much as that anti-intellectual kleptocratic nonsense can be called policy).
Also for the Supreme Court, 81% of people who support Democratic candidates view it as important and 72% who favor the Republican candidates view it as important.
There's more but this is what jumped out at me and frankly with this in mind, I think that the narrative that the GOP has been supercharged by the Kavanaugh appointment isn't actually true and that poll was merely an outlier.
While this is true I think it's a silly attitude to have, obviously we should not assume that they'll definitely keep to their word but the fact that they feel the need to say this and the fact they didn't have enough votes previously is quite telling. Skepticism is fine but TBH I think some people are verging on denialism, what politicians say matters and that includes Republicans.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Oct 4th 2018 at 10:58:26 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangI will say that after taking a closer look at 538's current standing it isn't that alarming. Yes, a 5 point drop in four days is concerning, but it's still higher than back in early-mid August when it was barely above 70. In retrospect, getting to 80 was an anomaly. At this point, we should just wait and see.
I completely agree that would be the rational decision.
Honestly, this situation is the perfect example of why pessimism and defeatism are never a good idea, it looked bad at first but as more information came out it turned out that it wasn't as doomy as we thought. Thankfully the thread as a whole stayed rational about it instead of panicking.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangThey have been trying to find flaws in Ford's account, mostly that she's the only one who remembers being there and how there are gaps in it.
Of course, this is all ignoring the fact that this isn't unusual and it was 30 years ago, so they really have no leg to stand on.
I'm not surprised they're saying those awful things as well tho.

Yeah. Honestly, I'm really scared of what's going to happen now. It's hard for me to not regress into panic and doomsaying.
Do not obey in advance.