Dear Republicans: Cheer Up

In this post a couple of weeks ago, I made the case that Republicans are in for a good night on November 8. Since then, I’ve come across a few more items that fortify that belief.

First, on Tuesday came this astonishing story from, not Breitbart, but CNN: “Republicans hold a near-historic lead on a key midterm indicator”

When CNN has a headline like that, it feels like you’re living in a dreamworld in which the NYT would have a headline reading, “Economy headed for trouble, women and minorities to be least affected.”

The gist of the CNN story is this:

Gallup, unlike other pollsters, has another twist on [the] question [which issue is most important to you in this election]. They follow it up by pressing respondents to answer which party they think can better handle the issue that they just named as the most important.

Gallup’s latest data shows that 48% of Americans believe the Republican Party is best equipped, while 37% believe it is the Democratic Party.

This 11-point Republican edge is one of the best they have ever had. Looking at 20 midterm elections since 1946 when this question was asked, only once has the Republican Party had a larger advantage on this question. That was in 1946 when Republicans had a 17 point lead on the Democrats.

Republicans had a net gain of 55 House seats in the 1946 election. And while the correlation is far from perfect (+0.7 on a scale of -1 to 1) between House seats won by the Republican Party and how they stood against the Democrats on the most important issue question, it is very much existent.

This election has become nationalized like few I’ve seen. No matter what questions voters think are most important, from inflation and the economy (the two leaders) to abortion and Donald Trump, they’re nationwide in scope. And in a nationalized election, party preference is even more influential than usual.

The second item is this Gallup poll on the related question of party affiliation, a poll taken several months before the one reported by CNN. The title is, “U.S. Political Party Preferences Shifted Greatly During 2021.” You won’t have a hard time guessing which party is gaining and which is losing.

On average, Americans' political party preferences in 2021 looked similar to prior years, with slightly more U.S. adults identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic (46%) than identified as Republicans or leaned Republican (43%).

However, the general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter….

Both the nine-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter and the five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter are among the largest Gallup has measured for each party in any quarter since it began regularly measuring party identification and leaning in 1991.

Here’s the graph:

Now it’s possible that things have improved for the Democrats in 2022, but what with this year’s having been the worst for inflation in four decades, and the stock market’s having cratered since January more than at any time since the Great Recession (including today’s nastiness), and the present recession’s being no longer realistically deniable even by the most robust partisans, I think not.

Then there’s the right track/wrong track number. The right track picked up some in late summer, but is now once again in the tank. The RCP average shows that two-thirds think the country is on the wrong track, while just over a quarter disagree — a “wrong track” margin of almost forty percent. The incumbent majority in both Houses is going to do only so well with those numbers.

Finally, Republicans have going for them the most powerful ally of all — time. Let’s start with the two issues most troubling for the GOP, abortion/Dobbs and the looming, distasteful presence of Donald Trump. The problem for the Democrats is that both are receding. With each passing day, it becomes more evident that, Dobbs notwithstanding, anyone in this country who seriously wants an abortion can get one — in other words, that the state of play for any practical purpose is very much as it was before Dobbs was decided.

And, for as much as the Democrats and the media would like to keep Trump front and center, it gets harder — mostly because yesterday’s news is still yesterday’s news, but also because each week, Trump himself becomes more obviously shrill, past-oriented and self-obsessed — less a menace than a chronic annoyance. This won’t stop the media from hyping him as much as they can, but it does mean their job gets harder and harder.

Time is also on the Republicans’ side for the issues that favor them. Inflation, and the burden it puts on family budgets, is not a one-off. Its burden is cumulative and wearing. The recession is still new; our Seventies-style stagflation and — how shall I say this? — malaise has only just begun. National security is starting to appear on the radar screen as a more serious threat than it has seemed in years. Putin is threatening to use nuclear weapons; China is increasingly aggressive; and North Korea has started launching its missiles over Japan, something it had not done since 2017.

Bottom line: The country is in trouble, but so, therefore, are the incumbent Democratic majorities that are running it.