Democrats had a golden summer. The Dobbs decision led to a surge of voter registrations. Voters handed Democrats a string of sweet victories in unlikely places — Alaska and Kansas, and good news in upstate New York.
The momentum didn’t survive the fall.
Over the past month or so, there’s been a rumbling across the land, and the news is not good for Team Blue. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll 49 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican for Congress, and 45 percent said they planned to vote for a Democrat. Democrats held a one-point lead last month.
The poll contained some eye-popping numbers. Democrats were counting on abortion rights to be a big issue, gaining them broad support among female voters. It doesn’t seem to be working. Over the past month, the gender gap, which used to favor Democrats, has evaporated. In September, women who identified as independent voters favored Democrats by 14 points. Now they favor Republicans by 18 percentage points.
Republicans lead among independents overall by 10 points.
To understand how the parties think the campaign is going, look at where they are spending their money. As Henry Olsen noted in The Washington Post last week, Democrats are pouring money into House districts that should be safe — places that Joe Biden won by double digits in 2020. Politico’s election forecast, for example, now rates the races in California’s 13th District and Oregon’s Sixth District as tossups. Two years ago, according to Politico, he won those areas by 11 and 14 points.
If Republicans are competitive in places like that, we’re probably looking at a red wave election that will enable them to easily take back the House and maybe the Senate.
So how should Democrats interpret these trends? There’s a minimalist interpretation: Midterms are usually hard for the president’s party, and this one was bound to be doubly hard because of global inflation.
I take a more medium to maximalist view. I’d say recent events have exposed some serious weaknesses in the party’s political approach:
It’s hard to win consistently if voters don’t trust you on the top issue. In a recent AP-NORC poll, voters trust Republicans to do a better job handling the economy, by 39 percent to 29 percent. Over the past two years, Democrats have tried to build a compelling economic platform by making massive federal investments in technology, infrastructure and child welfare. But those policies do not seem to be moving voters. As The Times’s Jim Tankersley has reported, Democratic candidates in competitive Senate races are barely talking about the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which included direct payments to citizens.
I thought the child tax credit expansion would be massively popular and could help create a Democratic governing majority. It turned out to be less popular than many anticipated, and there was little hue and cry when it expired. Maybe voters have a built-in uneasiness about income redistribution and federal spending.
Democrats have a crime problem. More than three-quarters of voters say that violent crime is a major problem in the United States, according to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll. Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden worked hard to give the Democrats credibility on this issue. Many Democrats have walked away from policies the party embraced then, often for good reasons. But they need to find another set of policies that will make the streets safer.
Democrats have not won back Hispanics. In 2016, Donald Trump won 28 percent of the Hispanic vote. In 2020, it was up to 38 percent. This year, as William A. Galston noted in The Wall Street Journal, recent surveys suggest that Republicans will once again win about 34 to 38 percent of the Hispanic vote. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is leading the Democrat Charlie Crist by 16 points among Hispanics likely to vote.
The New York Times
