UPDATE: Uh Oh.
Dems had a 10% edge in July on registered voters who said the election was very important. That edge was 2% Monday https://t.co/QpWRgOXm6L
— James Arkin (@JamesArkin) October 3, 2018
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Democrats needed something for 2018. For most of 2017-2018, the Left has just complained. Trump is doing this, that, or the other—and it’s wrong. Also, we’re in a constitutional crisis. If we were, and we weren’t, folks, then we’ve survived some 400 crises thus far. For a party that says institutional integrity has come under attack, they’ve remained firm despite the Trump White House’s phantom attempts to undermine the country. We all know these rants are grounded in sour grapes over Hillary Clinton not winning the 2016 election. It’s been a prolonged anti-Trump tantrum ever since late November 2016.
Since then, the Republicans have passed comprehensive tax reform that has catapulted the economy. The Dow Jones has reached its highest levels ever. Consumer and small business confidence are at near two-decade highs. Second quarter growth reached four percent. U.S. worker pay reached its highest levels in nearly a decade. Three million jobs were created. Over three million working class families got bonus checks averaging $1,000 or more. Oh, and unemployment is at an 18-year low. The horror, the horror, says the Left, whereas everyone else is going about their day, with bigger paychecks and a boost in business optimism.
It’s not enough to be just anti-Trump. I think even the most vicious of anti-Trumpers knew this as well. Mitt Romney tried to be the anti-Obama. He lost. John Kerry was the anti-Bush. He lost. With no time left, the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh was going to be the last chance at a nationwide attempt to mobilize the Democratic base. Yes, local special election wins started a fire, but this could set the 2018 midterms ablaze for the progressive Left. Kavanaugh was conservative. He was going to be the fifth vote in the conservative block, creating a solid conservative majority for a generation. All of this meant Roe v Wade was under threat. If there’s anything that gets the Left motivated, it’s aborting babies. They unleashed the hounds, dropping baseless and thus far witness-free allegations of sexual misconduct. They have executed one of the most brutal character assassination campaigns in recent memory.
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Democrats are trying to weaponize Me Too to win the 2018 midterms. If Democrats can delay this nomination until after the elections and run out the clock, they can block Kavanaugh with their newly cemented wins. That’s if they win. They’re hoping to use the "abortion will be outlawed" scare tactic. Is it working? Well, that depends, but their advantage in the generic voter ballot has been cut in half.
Our Hot Air colleague Ed Morrissey has more about whether we’re seeing the Kavanaugh effect. As Democrats continue to trash this man more and more without evidence, it seems people, outside CNN-land and the Acela Corridor, are appalled by this smear campaign. That will be compounded when the FBI will most likely find zero corroborative evidence to the three sexual misconduct allegations that have been lobbed at the judge; 60 percent want to see the judge confirmed, that includes 55 percent of women:
With 35 days until midterms, @TheDemocrats’ generic-ballot lead has been cut from +12 last month to +7 now.#Election2018 https://t.co/tKnu1wIPvO
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) October 2, 2018
This certainly indicates some movement off the norm, at least in the Q-poll. And it may not actually indicate a turnout model change, either, as Quinnipiac still isn’t applying a likely-voter model to its polling. This change has occurred in the larger population of registered voters, suggesting that a likely-voter model might have shown more momentum in the GOP’s direction.
Does this represent a Kavanaugh effect? The polling for this took place between Thursday and Sunday, meaning that three of the four days came after the televised hearings in which Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford testified, a hearing obsessively covered by the national news media. One might have expected Democrats to get a bump coming out of that hearing, especially given the tenor of the coverage it received. Instead, the momentum shifted in the other direction even among the wider population. It’s tough to directly correlate that to Kavanaugh, since Quinnipiac didn’t bother to ask any questions on the issue, but it’s tough to assume that it had no impact either.
[…]
Harvard-Harris (via John Nolte) has Democrats up nine after the hearing, also among RVs, but it did ask some key Kavanaugh-related questions. Respondents want their senators to vote against Kavanaugh’s confirmation as it stands at the moment by a plurality of 44/37. However, it also asks whether Kavanaugh should be confirmed if his accusers can’t provide “any evidence to corroborate the claims and Kavanaugh says these incidents did not happen.” That changes the results dramatically; under those conditions, a double-digit majority wants Kavanaugh confirmed, 57/43. If the FBI doesn’t find anything specific about Ford’s allegations, that number goes up to 60/40, including 55% of women.
That’s not the only danger for Democrats, either. Seventy-five percent of respondents say that Dianne Feinstein should have immediately turned the letter over to the committee rather than sit on it. Sixty-nine percent of respondents called the hearing “a national disgrace,” with 55% concluding that Democrats have been “completely partisan” in their handling of Kavanaugh. (Thirty percent of Democrats agree with that, by the way.) And finally, the Harvard-Harris poll shows 45% of respondents say the Kavanaugh hearing has made them more likely to vote in the midterms, although that splits out pretty evenly across party lines.
So, with that all said, it’s far from certain that Republicans hold onto Congress. The GOP is in a much better position with the Senate races, but House races could get tight. The treatment of Kavanaugh has united the Right. The only way for the GOP to mess this up is to totally cave on this nomination. With less than 50 days until Election Day, the blue wave that Democrats have hopes for could come crashing onto a jetty. Then again, if Democrats do well, there will be hearing after hearing after hearing over things they digress with Trump on—and while that does nothing to move our country forward, Trump will have the perfect punching bag and a "do-nothing Congress" narrative that will come in handy by the time 2020 rolls around.
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