Political Pundits DO shift with the wind….
Their editors love the ‘horserun’ thing that shifting entails….
Abortion throwdown by the Alito 5?
Advantage Democrats….
Saudi oil cutback?
Advantage Republicans….
NOW?
Report that consumer prices have climbed along with the Fed jacking up interst rates….
(THE ECONOMY)
A poll with a slight Democratic gain?
Advantage Democrats….
This Dog?
Democrats US Senate…
Republicans US House….
Oh?
A couple of guys said last week that Democrats COULD ‘maybe’ KEEP the US House…..
We have the result of our third New York Times/Siena College national survey of the midterm cycle to go with your coffee this morning: 49 percent of voters say they back the Republican congressional candidate in their district, compared with 45 percent backing the Democratic one.
It’s a modest but notable swing from last month, when Democrats led by one percentage point among likely voters. Since then, the warning signs for Democrats have begun to add up, including Republican polling gains in key Senate races like those in Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and surprising Republican strength in districts in Rhode Island and Oregon where Democrats would normally be safe.
Up to this point, Democrats have maintained a narrow lead in polls asking whether voters prefer Democrats or Republicans for Congress, but there have been warning signs for the party here as well. Republicans have led in several high-quality polls, like ABC/Washington Post, CBS/YouGov and Monmouth University. Today, the Times/Siena survey adds a fourth such poll to the pile.
The evidence for a shift toward Republicans appears to be underpinned by a change in the national political environment. Gas prices went up again. The stock market is down. A variety of datasuggests that the electorate’s attention is shifting back to issues where Republicans are on stronger ground in public opinion, like the economy, inflation, crime and immigration, and away from the summer’s focus on democracy, gun violence and abortion, where Democrats have an edge….
Republicans enter the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress with a narrow but distinctive advantage as the economy and inflation have surged as the dominant concerns, giving the party momentum to take back power from Democrats in next month’s midterm elections, a New York Times/Siena College pollhas found.
The poll shows that 49 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican to represent them in Congress on Nov. 8, compared with 45 percent who planned to vote for a Democrat. The result represents an improvement for Republicans since September, when Democrats held a one-point edge among likely voters in the last Times/Siena poll. (The October poll’s unrounded margin is closer to three points, not the four points that the rounded figures imply.)…
Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all had average approval ratings of between 43% and 45% at this point in their first terms. Their parties all suffered net losses of between 40 and 63 seats in the House. The opposition party ended up with between 230 and 242 seats.
That’s what the race ratings suggest is the most likely range of House seats Republicans will hold after this election. (Of recent presidents, only George W. Bush had a higher average approval rating, at 62%. His party picked up House seats in 2002.)
Yes, other factors, most prominently the generic ballot, indicate that House Democrats are going to do better.
But as I pointed out last week, the generic ballot is far from a perfect predictor. If the generic ballot results hold through the election and House Republicans outperform it by as much as they did in 2020, they very likely will end up somewhere in the range of 230 to 242 House seats.
Election models by FiveThirtyEight and Jack Kersting, which are based on a bevy of variables, give Republicans about a one-third chance of ending up with at least 230 seats. That’s still better than the chance either model gives Democrats of holding on to the House….