How Many Seats, How Many Seats?

Yesterday Kaiser Health released their brand new tracking poll. Among registered voters. 50% said they will vote for a Democrat and 38% said they will vote for a Republican for Congress. In April it was 46% Democrat and 38% Republican. They also broke it out in 2 swing states, Florida and Nevada. In Florida it was 49% for a Democrat and 43% for a Republican. In Nevada it was 45% Democrat and 43% Republican. Their poll shows a 40-54% approval-disapproval for Trump. There were 5 other polls released yesterday that tracked Trump's approval rating. He was underwater in all 5. Even the Republican Rasmussen Poll had him at 47% approval and 52% disapproval and they almost always show him with higher approval than disapproval numbers, the only poll that does.

Why am I telling you this? Simple. As Ashley Parker reported for the Washington Post, "Trump has deliberately placed himself at the center of the November elections, explicitly telling voters to imagine they’re casting a ballot for him, rather than their local representative… The president, meanwhile, has told White House aides that his supporters won’t come out to the polls if they don’t believe the election matters to him. He wants to campaign for Republicans six days a week-- and sees these mega-rallies as a testing ground for his own 2020 reelection… While aides around Trump have grown increasingly concerned about the prospect of Republicans losing the House, the president himself privately insists the polls are fake and that his performances at rallies will carry Republicans to victory."

Unless he knows that the cavalry is Kossacks are coming, he's even more delusional than usual... although it looks like Indiana Senator Joe Donnelly is betting on Trump.



Ron Brownstein, writing for The Atlantic-- The 2018 Midterms Are All About Trump-- sees two waves: a red wave in rural Trump country and an anti-red wave in the suburbs. The dynamic is "dimming Democrats’ prospects in the exurban and small-town districts mostly on the periphery of their target list in the House. But it is simultaneously solidifying the Democratic advantage in many of the white-collar suburban seats, especially those that preferred Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016, key to their hopes of recapturing a House majority."

Both sides of this equation capture the continued transformation of congressional elections into quasi-parliamentary contests that are turning less on assessments of individual candidates and more on broader attitudes about whether voters want Congress to enable the president or check him. “In the last few elections, we’ve moved more toward a parliamentary system where you are voting based on the leader and not necessarily on your local candidate,” says Glen Bolger, a longtime Republican pollster.

This long-term shift toward nationalized congressional elections decided largely by attitudes about the president is affecting contests both in the places where Trump is popular and in those where he’s disliked. That means the party most satisfied with next month’s results may be the one with the most candidates who succeed at swimming against that current: Democrats who find ways to win in Trump country and Republicans who hold on in the major metropolitan areas moving away from him. At this point, pollsters in both parties don’t expect to find many examples on either side. “It’s going to be tough for both,” says Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. Bolger concurs: “It’s possible that both are disappointed.”

The correlation between attitudes about the president and voting choices in congressional elections has been increasing over the past generation. In a recent paper examining long-term survey data, Gary Jacobson, a University of California at San Diego political scientist who specializes in Congress, found that the congruence between voters’ assessments of the president and whether they supported his party’s candidate in House and Senate contests ticked up in the 1980s and 1990s before rising more rapidly in midterm elections during this century.

Exit polls now track a powerful connection between attitudes toward the president and votes in both House and Senate elections. In the past three midterm elections-- 2006, 2010, and 2014-- exit polls found that 84 to 87 percent of voters who approved of the president’s performance voted for his party’s candidates in House elections. Simultaneously, 82 to 84 percent of those who disapproved of the president’s performance voted against his party’s House candidates. Since most voters in each election disapproved of the president’s performance, his party suffered substantial House losses each time.

Brownstein is smart but I disagree with his conclusion that "In the House, these late-season trends may be simultaneously reducing the odds that Democrats win 45 seats but somewhat increasing their chances of winning at least the 23 seats they need to recapture the majority. Democratic hopes look to be fading in many of the strongly Republican-leaning exurban and small-town seats that made the outer edge of their target list earlier this summer. Democratic chances in those places always turned on low GOP turnout, and that now appears much less likely." Looking at specific districts, not numerical mumbo jumbo, I see the Democrats winning not 45 seats, more than 50.

Rural voters don't care about this? Really?