Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Democrats Are on Pace for a Down-Ballot Blowout

Much can change in the months between today and election day in November, 2020, but if current trends hold, not only will Trump likely be ejected from the White House but so too will many down ballot Republicans. While some Republicans try to pretend they are distanced from Trump, increasingly - and I would argue, correctly - voters see no line of separation between down ballot Republicans and Trump.  Truth be told, all of the GOP is now complicit in the nightmare that is the Trump/Pence regime and need to be punished at the polls accordingly.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at what may prove to be a decimation of down ballot Republicans.  Let's keep fingers crossed that Trump's woes worsen and that the GOP goes down with his sinking ship.  Here are article excerpts:

By now, you are probably aware that Donald Trump’s poll numbers have seen better days. [Trump] The president trails Joe Biden by an average of 9.6 percent in RealClearPolitics’s poll of polls. On Tuesday, USA Today/Suffolk’s poll — which had Trump leading Biden last December — showed the Democratic nominee ahead by 12. No incumbent president has ever trailed by this much at this point in an election cycle. Trump’s numbers have been so uniformly and egregiously bad, even the poll-unskewer-in-chief admitted last week that he was losing telling Sean Hannity that Joe Biden is “gonna be your president because some people don’t love me, maybe.”
The GOP’s abysmal polling in the congressional generic ballot has garnered less attention. In today’s Suffolk poll, voters favored a Democratic Congress over a Republican one by 14 points. In 538’s polling average, Democrats boast a nine-point lead on the question of which party’s congressional candidates voters intend to support. In 2018, Democrats won the House “popular vote” by roughly eight points, the party’s best showing since the Watergate scandal, and a margin large enough to turn more than 40 districts blue. Thus, current national polling suggests Democrats are poised to consolidate their midterm gains and make further inroads into Republican territory this fall. And as the New York Times’s Nate Cohn notes, surveys of discrete swing-district House races are consistent with that story: We've got three Dem polls this morning, all generally apocalyptic for the GOP Even in TX-06 (and GOP+4 in the House race) Biden+10 in IN-05 (and D+6 in the House) Biden+2 in MO
Republicans can lose the popular vote in a rout this November and still retain their Senate Majority. But if Biden beats Trump by ten points — while Democratic House candidates outpace GOP ones by nine — Chuck Schumer will probably be a Majority Leader come January.
Notably, a 2020 down-ballot landslide would represent a marked departure from events four years ago. Even as Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, Republican congressional candidates won 1.1 percentage points more ballots than their Democratic adversaries. This was partly attributable to the (then) GOP House majority’s incumbency advantages. But it also ostensibly reflected a widespread perception that congressional Republicans — and Donald J. Trump — were very different political entities.
Four years later, swing voters no longer recognize much distinction between [Trump] the president and his party. The GOP’s loudest Trump skeptics have either been evicted from Congress or converted to the faith. On impeachment, coronavirus, and just about everything in between, congressional Republicans have made [Trump's] the president’s cause their own. And the public has taken note.

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