100 days: Dems have midterm edge, but it's not historic

Democrats and Republicans alike are weighing whether the November midterm elections will turn into a blue wave that acts as a referendum on President Trump, or whether voters will make only modest adjustments to the levers of power in Washington because of a strong economy.

No one is popping any champagne just yet: Public and private polls show a deeply unsettled landscape, one that could break hard for Democrats — or even add to the Republican majority in the Senate.

Democrats have an advantage, though not one of historic proportions, based on the usual midterm metrics, including the mere fact they do not hold the White House — which is historically a disadvantage for the party that holds it. But economic indicators, a less reliable metric by which to forecast election results, show some underlying strengths for the GOP.

“Everything politics has taught us in the last four decades suggests you want to be the party out of the White House in a midterm when the president’s net approval is as low as it is today,” said Bruce Mehlman, a Republican lobbyist who closely tracks electoral trends.

“However, those same historical lessons were crystal clear that Hillary Clinton was going to win the White House.”

Democrats have a clear edge over Republicans in voter enthusiasm. A June survey from the Pew Research Center showed Democratic voters were five points more likely than Republicans to say they were more excited to vote this year than in previous midterms, mirroring other surveys that show Democratic enthusiasm at higher levels than the GOP.

But their edge is not as significant as the winning party’s advantage in the last two major wave elections, in 2010 and 2006. Eight years ago, Republicans held a 15-point enthusiasm edge, and they picked up 63 Democratic-held seats in Barack Obama’s first midterm election.

Four years before that, Democrats had a 32-point enthusiasm gap, and the party picked up 30 seats.

“Democrats are angry, and that’s not changing in the next 100 days,” said Ron Klain, a Democratic strategist and former chief of staff to Vice Presidents Joe Biden and Al Gore. “The unknown is whether that anger turns into a huge turnout.”

Voters also give Democrats an advantage on the generic ballot question, a common gauge pollsters use to determine which side has an edge in the 435 House races across the country.

That gap has hovered in the 6 to 10-point range in recent weeks. But Democratic voters tend to live in more concentrated areas and the party would typically needs a more significant advantage in the generic ballot number than do Republicans, whose voters are spread through more exurban and rural districts.

Democrats need a higher share of the midterm vote to win a majority of seats, in other words, than do Republicans. In 2014, when Democrats led the generic ballot in both CNN and NBC/WSJ surveys by only slim margins, Republicans ended up winning 13 Democratic-held seats. The last time Democrats gained significantly, in 2006, the party held a 15-point advantage in both surveys.

By contrast, Republicans enjoyed a generic ballot advantage of between two and six points in late October 2010, according to CNN and NBC/Wall Street Journal polls, but that narrow edge still resulted in the 63-seat gain.

“With the generic ballot running about D+6-7, it’s a challenging environment, but not insurmountable,” Brian O. Walsh, who runs a Republican umbrella organization close to the White House, said in an email. “The battlefield will continue to be run through Republican-leaning areas, which will be an asset.”

Trump’s approval rating may matter most of all. Today, his approval rating sits at between 38 percent and 45 percent, according to reputable surveys. That is lower than Obama’s in 2010, when Democrats lost so many seats, but higher than George W. Bush’s in 2006, when Democrats made big gains.

Mehlman said big midterm swings tend to happen when the opposition party is most angry at the sitting president, something he called the “resistance gap.” Trump’s approval rating is just 9 percent among Democrats, according to Gallup — marginally worse than Obama’s ranking among Republicans in 2010, and marginally better than Bush’s among Democrats in 2006.

“Democrats are very united in their disapproval of Trump,” said Mike Noble, a Republican strategist and pollster in Arizona. “It’s a toxic environment to have an ‘R’ next to your name on the ballot.”

In the last two midterm elections when a president had relatively strong ratings among the other party’s voters — Bush in 2002, and Bill Clinton in 1998, both of whom were in the mid-30s among the other side’s voters — the president’s party actually gained seats.

Republicans have pinned their hopes on the fact that more voters are feeling optimistic about the direction of the country than in recent years.

Today, 38 percent of Americans tell Gallup pollsters they are satisfied with the direction of the country, while 60 percent are dissatisfied. That 22-point gap is smaller than it was in the 2010 and 2014 midterms in which the opposition party made big gains. It is relatively close to the 26-point gap that existed in 2006.

Some Republicans expressed frustration that the White House — and Trump specifically — have been unable to exploit a booming economy and low unemployment rates for political gain.

“The economy and tax reform isn’t an abstract issue like Russia,” said Ryan Williams, a New Hampshire Republican operative who advised Mitt Romney. “I wish the president would talk every day about the economy and tax reform instead of other things he talks about. It distracts from the success story.”

The last two midterms in which more voters said the country was headed in the right direction than those who said it was off on the wrong track, in 2002 and 1998, the president’s party made gains, even though the unemployment rate was higher than it is today.

Both Democrats and Republicans say the confusing national poll numbers do not tell the full story, and that polls in specific districts tell a more nuanced tale.

Non-partisan analysts also see a wider battlefield than the generic ballot question might suggest. The Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball each list 37 races as tossups or likely party flips; analyst Nathan Gonzales, who runs Inside Elections, counts 31 races as most competitive.

In all three cases, the vast majority of competitive seats are currently held by Republicans.

Democrats feel they have an advantage, pointing to the record-breaking number of candidates they have recruited, and to fundraising numbers that continue to impress.

“We had a nail-biter going into the Virginia gubernatorial elections, and we picked up 15 seats [in the House of Delegates] in a Republican-gerrymandered map,” said Jessica Post, who runs the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “We have more Democrats running than ever, which means we’ll be able to concentrate resources on key seats.”

Others point to Democratic performance in special elections and primary elections this year.

“For all the ups and downs of polling, the reality is Democrats around the country continue to over-perform, often significantly, in special elections. Moreover, we’ve seen stronger than average turnout in primaries,” said Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic consultant.

With three months to go, and billions to be spent prosecuting cases for and against candidates, the public metrics add up to a Democratic advantage of relatively minor proportions. But the fact that Democratic candidates are polling so close to their Republican rivals even this far out scares the GOP.

And Democrats don’t even need an above-average year to win back the House: In midterm elections dating back to 1948, the party that does not control the White House has picked up an average of 36 seats when the president’s approval rating is below 50 percent.

Democrats need to win back just 25 seats — including a vacant seat they will almost certainly win — to reclaim control.

“Democrats may not be ahead right now in enough races to win” the House, said Tom Davis, a former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “The Democrats aren’t winning, but they’ve moved these things to single-digit races.”

My intuition says the GOP is going to crush it this coming November. While my instinct is not quite as strong it was in 2016 that Trump would win (thereby impelling me to bet big bucks on predictit.com, which had stupid odds that Trump was going to lose), I believe the tea leaves mostly point to a historically unlikely midterm win by the party in power, namely the GOP in this case.

I see at least thirty-seven reasons why the GOP is favored over the Democrats for the 2018 midterm elections:

1. President Trump and the GOP waved their magic wands (as Obama put it during the 2016 election) and produced a booming economy in less than two years in power. This Trump/GOP economy is one of the best economies since WWII, and one that quickly materialized, even after decades of chronic under-performance and low-level recession during the lackluster Bush/Obama decades. Voters vote their pocketbooks more than any other issues by far, and a booming economy is always very bad news for the party that’s out of power.

2. The Trump/GOP major tax reform has benefited regular folks and super-charged the economy, and most of whose benefits have yet to even arrive, e.g., hundreds of billions of repatriated profits still are arriving onto our shores from the rest of the world and have yet to be invested into domestic manufacturing infrastructure.

3. President Trump and the GOP Congress eliminated the vile and counterproductive Obamacare mandate, which required people to pay a fine for the privilege of not buying medical insurance.

4. President Trump’s North Korean denuclearization efforts are headed in the right direction so far, e.g., North Korean rocket engine testing infrastructure is currently being dismantled.

5. President Trump has kept his campaign promises on dozens of issues, including withdrawing from TPP, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement nonsense, and halting payment of U.S. foreign aid to U.S. enemies like Palestinian terrorists. Implementing such a massive number of campaign promises and without backtracking or equivocating is essentially unprecedented in U.S. history. It’s extremely rare for any politician to keep their campaign promises (especially Republicans), and keeping campaign promises inspires confidence in the integrity of those who keep their promises.

6. President Trump instructed his military to QUICKLY destroy ISIS, but has otherwise kept us out of foreign wars, as well as fruitless and ridiculously expensive “nation building” exercises in third world countries that can barely keep the power on and the water running.

7. President Trump’s policies have resulted in deporting MS-13 and other drug-dealing gang-members and many other criminal illegal aliens.

8. President Trump has implacably fought back against the leftist fake stream media, driving them to such extremes of rage that they have now essentially destroyed themselves for all time by losing credibility with the regular folks and losing their ability to convince people of things that are not true. The term “fake news” has now forever entered the lexicon of American politics.

9. President Trump has exposed the Bushite/GOPe/RINO/Globalist/anti-Trumper pretend-”conservatives” as being toadies of the oligarchs and plutocrats and NOT the champions of the people they claimed they were, thus destroying the non-Democrat half of the “Uniparty”, which has been the REAL party of the wildly wealthy.

10. In less than two years, President Trump’s economic policies have resulted in the lowest black unemployment rate in history, the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in history, and the highest female wages in history, and polls have shown significant increase of support for Trump amongst these groups of voters, groups who are normally the bedrock of Democrat support.

11. In less than two years, President Trump’s and the Congressional GOP’s economic policies have produced the highest stock market in history.

12. President Trump has forced NATO nations to pay billions more of their agreed-upon share of expenses, with more billions to come.

13. President Trump’s temporary punitive tariffs have panicked the EU into complete capitulation on the issue of tariff-free fair trade, with Canada and China soon to follow. Mexico is not far behind with U.S. threats of withdrawing from NAFTA all together if Mexico doesn’t cooperate. At this point, our foreign trading partners know for a fact that President Trump is serious about forcing fair trade and that he will not hesitate to take whatever actions are necessary to bring that about, even if some of those actions might temporarily be antithetical to some segments of the U.S. economy.

14. President Trump and the GOP Congress have implemented massive deregulation of industry.

15. CAFE auto fleet mileage standards that are extremely harmful to our auto industry are on the verge of being rolled back by President Trump’s EPA.

16. President Trump’s EPA has eliminated scientifically-baseless carbon regulations that have pointlessly stifled U.S. energy production and thereby raised the cost of living for everyone in the U.S.

17. President Trump and the GOP Senate have already installed one strict Constitutionalist to the U.S. Supreme Court, with a second strict Constitutionalist soon to follow.

18. President Trump and the GOP Senate have appointed 44 Federal judges to date.

19. President Trump halted unvetted immigration from terrorists countries and implemented extreme vetting for all legal immigration, greatly reducing the influx of America-hating Muslims, as well as greatly reducing the pool of radicalized terrorists.

20. President Trump has cracked down on illegal immigration in general, stemming the flood from our southern border.

21. President Trump has put warriors back in charge of the war department and made warfare the principle aim of the military instead of various social justice ideologies, thus reinvigorating the U.S. as the world’s only superpower and diminishing the probabilities of war via a much stronger hand for peace through strength.

22. President Trump is a strong supporter of Israel, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

23. President Trump has strong relationships with Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

24. President Trump has been playing hardball at every juncture at the UN, including a 24% reduction in U.S. payments to the UN.

25. President Trump’s election and the Clinton’s resultant loss of their singular iron grip of the Democrat Party has effectively destroyed the Democrat Party for the time being. The Democrat Party essentially has no platform other than “Trump is evil” and must be destroyed at all costs. The Party has now lost all party discipline, splintering into internecine warfare and allowing its lunatic and radical socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-law-and-order, anti-border, anti-nationalist, anti-American wings free rein to dominate the national media and national conversation, thus exposing the Democrat Party to the nation-at-large as a radical, anti-American party that’s totally antithetical to traditional American values cherished by the great majority of our citizens.

26. President Trump’s successes and Democrat’s excesses have triggered the “walkaway” movement with Democrats of every generation and socioeconomic status leaving the Democrat party in highly public fashions.

27. Recent polls have shown that younger voting generations are now equally split in support of Republicans and Democrats, which is completely unprecedented; recent polls have also shown that younger voters are also unlikely to vote in great numbers in midterm elections. Youngsters have traditionally been supporters of Democrats so both these sets of polls are bad news for the Democrats.

28. The Democrat Party is having extreme difficulty with fundraising at the national level, while the national GOP has record fundraising.

29. Polls repeatedly show that the GOP is more trusted on economic and national security issues than the Democrats.

30. President Trump’s approval numbers are higher at this point than Obama’s were at this same time in his first term, despite the leftist fake stream media’s universal adulation of Obama then, and their universal hatred of Trump now.

31. Since 2016, Congressional Democrats have continuously demonstrated that they are completely unwilling to assist in governing our nation and have demonstrated their contempt for the well-being of our people, instead adopting strident scorched earth policies of obfuscation, propaganda, lies, and “resistance”, no matter how badly such behavior may hurt our citizens and our nation.

32. The leftist fake stream media, Hollywood “celebrities”, and Democrat leaders like Maxine Waters have deliberately encouraged an environment of extreme public hostility, abandoning all norms of civil behavior, publicly hounding and attacking all who disagree with them, attempting to stifle freedom of speech at every turn, and even provoking weak-minded individuals into extreme violence, such as the attempted assassinations of Congressional Republicans at the Congressional Baseball Game for Charity in 2017. These acts simply do not inspire the average voter to want to put these kinds of people back into power.

33. The Democrat Party is wildly out of sync with the attitudes of the vast majority of regular folks, overtly promoting open borders and encouraging floods of illegal immigrants who do not speak, understand, or write English and who depress wages, and soak up tens of billions of dollars of free medical care and welfare paid by the taxpayers, as well as opposing the right of regular folks to own firearms for self-protection, proclaiming the desire to repeal the wildly popular and wildly effective GOP tax reform, impeaching President Trump solely because they refuse to accept that Trump won the election, abolish ICE (the agency that protects our borders and vets imported goods to prevent the import of weapons of mass destruction, counterfeit and/or dangerous goods), and the insane promotion of so-called “sanctuary cities”, in which violent, drug-dealing illegal alien gang-members and all other violent predatory illegal alien felons are protected from deportation.

34. President Trump has nearly destroyed the 1984ish Newspeak “politically correct” restrictions on free speech that the leftists have been perpetuating for decades in an attempt to limit people’s ability to speak the plain truth.

35. Private-sector rank-and-file union members are no longer knee-jerk supporters of the Democrats, finally realizing that Democrat (and Bushite) economic policies have been designed to flood the U.S. market with cheap illegal alien labor while at the same time driving manufacturing offshore to 3rd world countries with cheap labor supplies of their own, whereas President Trump and the Congressional GOP have been implementing policies to reverse these destructive trends. Additionally, a recent Supreme Count decision has eliminated public sector unions from extorting money from non-union public sector workers via the forced garnishment of union dues from government paychecks, with the result that these unions will be deprived of tens of millions of ill-gained dollars that they’ve been funneling to Democrat candidates and are also in the process of losing hundreds of thousands of members who joined only because they had to pay anyway whether or not they were members.

36. A recent poll shows 76% of U.S. voters will not vote for a socialist candidate, an unpleasant result for Democrats who are busily making socialism the newest de facto plank in the Democrat platform.

37. Voters don’t very much about issues that the leftist fake stream media and the Democrat Party are pushing. Most voters care pretty much only about the economy and illegal immigration according to a recent Gallup poll.

Thus, nearly all the political winds are pointing to a crushing defeat of the Democrats in 2018.

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