Dem
51
GOP
49
Horse-race polling a year out should be taken with a few grains of sodium chloride. Nevertheless, according to New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, multiple factors look discouraging for Joe Biden. Numerous demographic groups that are normally highly Democratic are losing faith in the Democrats. These include young voters, Black voters, and Latino voters. Working-class white voters are largely gone already. The Democrats traditionally were seen as representing the interests of the middle class. That is fraying as well.
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg ran a detailed poll with 2,500 respondents in swing states and districts. He asked them about 32 subjects. On China, climate change, women's rights, racial inequality, health care, protecting democracy, and not being an autocrat, voters preferred Biden to Trump. On making democracy more secure, it was a tie. On everything else, Trump led. These subjects included being for working people, standing up to elites, feeling safe, keeping wages up to inflation, patriotism, crime, immigration, and protecting the Constitution. We find Trump leading on protecting the Constitution... strange, to put it mildly. But Greenberg is a Democrat and a very experienced pollster. This is not some crazy Rasmussen poll sponsored by Fox News. Greenberg said: "This is grim."
The crosstabs show that the problem is Democrats falling away, not Republicans gaining. We saw the same effect in an item a week ago. The problem is clearly that Democrats are losing faith in the Democratic Party, not that they are suddenly becoming Republicans. Fundamentally, the expectations of many Democrats, especially ones who don't follow politics closely, are simply unrealistic. Democrats didn't have a working majority in the Senate during the first half of Biden's term because Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) opposed the President on so many things. But low-information voters don't want to hear that. What they know is: "He didn't deliver" and they are not interested in excuses.
A Morning Consult poll in September found that "voters are now more likely to see the Republican Party as capable of governing, tackling big issues and keeping the country safe compared with the Democratic Party." By a 9-point margin, voters see the Democrats as more ideologically extreme than the Republicans. Although Morning Consult didn't get into the details, we suspect that many voters believe that the Squad represents the Democratic Party. In public, it is even noisier than the Freedom Caucus, which focuses its ire more on internal House politics than on public opinion.
An NBC poll in September showed that 34% of voters believe the Republicans are better at looking out for the middle class and 36% believe the Democrats are better at it. Historically, the Democrats' lead on this question was as high as 29%. Now it is 2%. The poll was run jointly by Hart Research, a Democratic pollster, and Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican firm.
When Edsall asked Will Marshall, founder and president of the center-left Progressive Policy Institute, the question: "Trump is Kryptonite for American democracy, so why isn't President Biden leading him by 15 points?" Marshall answered that the ascendance of white, college-educated liberals has "pushed Democrats far to the dogmatic left, even as their base grows smaller. Young progressives have identified the party with stances on immigration, crime, gender, climate change and Palestinian resistance that are so far from mainstream sentiment that they can even eclipse MAGA extremism." In other words, the Democrats are focusing on culture-war issues rather than economic issues (e.g., inflation) and taking positions that are anathema to millions of voters.
Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, says that the Democrats are perceived as elitist and weak on issues that were once their foundation. Part of that is the right-wing fixation on the Democrats' "wokeness," but the Democrats do relatively little to refute that. They can't, because that is what young progressives want, but for much of the country, those positions are unacceptable. So if the Democrats go weak on woke, the young progressives won't vote but if they embrace wokeness, middle Americans will go Republican. The Democrats' biggest hope is that Trump will self-immolate, which is a real possibility, but not a strategy. (V)