Tipsheet

Confirmed: It's a Toxic Political Environment for Democrats

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  April 08, 2022 11:30 AM

A quick glance at the lay of the land, heading into the weekend.  Let's begin with Quinnipiac's latest batch of data on President Biden's job approval and the 2022 generic ballot.  The Biden numbers are a bit worse than the Real Clear Politics average, but not by much.  Check out the data points on independents and Hispanics in particular:


Biden's standing is lower among Latinos than voters overall, and Republicans and Democrats are virtually tied among this emerging demographic group.  We've been covering the movement of, er, 'LatinX' voters away from Democrats for awhile now, and here's another breadcrumb leading toward the conclusion that the shift is real.  Now, from another data set, look at some of these state-level numbers:


The president's national approval level is nearly identical to the Q-poll finding, and even more dismal among indies.  But if Biden really winds up at 40 percent or worse in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, it'll be a challenge for Democrats to hold the Senate.  Democrats may run a bit ahead of Biden in November -- might -- but if these outcomes are even close to where things settle by the fall, they'd need to run way ahead of Biden.  That would require big-time turnout from the base.  And that seems...unlikely at the moment:

At the end of October, Republicans held an 11-percentage-point advantage in voter enthusiasm. By January, that margin had ticked up to 14 points. Now, according to the most recent NBC News poll, it has swelled to 17 — a massive advantage that has foreshadowed devastating losses in Congress in prior years. The latest poll would be bad enough for Democrats. But it’s the trend line that is especially grim, seemingly impervious to a series of events — including President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address and the nomination of a judge to the Supreme Court — that Democrats had predicted might improve their candidates’ prospects in the fall...The NBC poll wasn’t a one-off. A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll on Wednesday registered a double-digit spread between the share of Democrats and Republicans who are “extremely enthusiastic” about voting in the midterms and a smaller — but still measurable — gap when accounting for voters who say they are only “very” enthusiastic.

Perhaps the Civiqs findings above are too bleak.  Perhaps not:


New Jersey is a state Biden carried by 16 points in 2020.  If he's in the mid-40's there, it's not a leap at all to hit far worse approval in Georgia or Pennsylvania.  And Nevada, which hasn't gone red for president since 2004, is looking especially shaky for the Dems these days:

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I'll leave you with two more data points.  One is another poll, in which an incumbent Republican governor appears to be weathering the storm of intense opposition from both Trump and the Left.  The other is one of those historical outliers that tend to pop up as political waves build:


Gosh, why does Kenosha sound familiar?