The numbers are out and they are not kind to the party that spent eighteen months convinced it was riding into November on a historic wave of anti-Trump outrage.
Start with the most revealing data point of all: Democratic disapproval of Trump has collapsed from 90% in 2018 to 69% today. That’s a 21-point drop in the intensity of opposition that powered the last blue wave. In 2018, nine out of ten Democrats who hated Trump showed up and voted that way. Today, nearly one in three of those same voters have apparently decided they don’t hate him quite enough to make it their defining political motivation. When your entire electoral strategy is built on one man’s unpopularity and that unpopularity drops 21 points among your own base, you have a serious problem.
The generic congressional ballot confirms it. In 2018, Democrats led by 10 points heading into the midterms. Today, they’re up by 3 in the Washington Post/Ipsos poll — and analysts who track this stuff closely have a simple rule: anything under D+4 on election night is likely a Republican hold on the House. Democrats aren’t just underperforming 2018. They’re underperforming the threshold they need to flip the chamber.
Even worse for Democrats: on the question of which party voters trust more on important issues, Republicans are now tied with or leading Democrats. That’s not supposed to happen for the party out of power heading into a midterm. Historically, opposition parties benefit from voter frustration with the status quo. Instead, Republicans are either matching or beating Democrats on the fundamental question of which side is actually on the voter’s side.
Sarah Longwell — who runs an anti-Trump operation and has every incentive to find Democrats the data they need — put it bluntly: Democrats think voters will flock to them. They won’t. Democrats are viewed even more negatively than Trump right now. The socialist wing of the party, rather than expanding the coalition, is actively repelling the swing voters Democrats desperately need.
Republicans aren’t blameless here. The SAVE America Act has been bungled for months by a Senate majority that can’t find 51 votes in a 53-seat caucus. The DHS funding debacle — where Senate Republicans apparently convinced themselves Democrats were serious about a deal, got played, and wasted weeks of legislative calendar — was political malpractice. Iran is back in the picture, and gas prices follow military conflict like night follows day. Trump’s approval ratings need to rise. These are real vulnerabilities and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
But the baseline picture is this: Republicans are currently on track to hold the House, the generic ballot is nowhere near where Democrats need it, and Trump derangement syndrome appears to be losing its grip on the voters Democrats need most.
November is four months away. A lot can change. Republicans should govern like the polls could get worse at any moment — because they always can.
But for today, the numbers tell a story Democrats didn’t want told. The blue wave isn’t coming. Not yet.
