If you’re a Democrat, you should be preparing for a political disaster in November. Currently, the question isn’t whether the GOP will win back the House—it’s by how much.
And political experts agree there’s nothing that can be done to change the Democrats’ fate now. Last month, CNN acknowledged that polls show Biden was near “the point of no return with Americans on the economy” and dangerously close to an “irreversible severing of public confidence in his capacity to deliver prosperity and financial security.” And gas prices were lower then.
Bill Clinton pollster Doug Sosnik also said the Democrats’ fate in the upcoming midterms can’t be changed at this point.
“If past elections are any indicator, we are heading into the final stage of the election period when voters are beginning to lock in on their views of the state of the country and their expectations for the future,” Sosnick explains in a memo obtained by Politico. “It is during this period – and not the final days of an election – that the public settles in how they are going to vote.”
“The President’s job approval during this stage is the best proxy to determine current levels of support for the party in power,” he continued. “And that window is closing rapidly. In the last four midterm elections, by June the public had made up its mind about the leadership in Washington and how they were going to vote in November. According to Gallup, Trump’s 39% job approval in early February 2018, Obama’s 41% approval in June 2014 and 45% approval in June 2010, and Bush’s 38% approval in March 2006 all matched their job approval on Election Day.”
Henry Olsen of The Washington Post agrees and suggests that the GOP will, at a minimum, pick up 20-35 seats in the House, and gaining fifty seats isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
“Recent political history shows that the course of a fall election is almost always set by Memorial Day,” Olsen writes. “RealClearPolitics Senior Elections Analyst Sean Trende recently noted that ‘election outcomes are more-or-less baked in’ by the end of the second quarter of an election year. Not even the financial crash of 2008 made a significant dent in that year’s outcome, which Trende says was largely expected in May of that year.”
So, we know that the situation for the Democrats is bad. How bad is it though? Olsen notes that political waves are remarkably predictable, however, “the final outcome is almost always worse for the losing party than analysts predicted six months out.”
One example cited by Olsen was the 2010 midterms. Pretty much everyone knew it would be a big year for the Republican Party, which was bolstered by the Tea Party movement. In May 2010, the Rothenberg Political Report projected GOP House gains of roughly two to three dozen seats. Their final projection was between 55 and 65 seats. Republicans ultimately picked up 63 seats.
And Barack Obama was still a popular president at the time, Joe Biden is not. The economy was bad under Obama, but he wasn’t blamed for it. Gas prices were climbing, but still under $3/gal when the midterm elections took place. In pretty much all ways that matter, Biden has things worse than Obama did.
November should be fun.