New Polls Put House In Play For Democrats

Following up on my prior post about Hillary opening up a significant lead, internal Democratic campaign polls now show the party with a seven point lead over Republicans in the generic Congressional poll. A lead like that certainly puts the House into play for Democrats. But there is even worse news for Republicans in tight re-election races. That same poll shows that it doesn’t matter whether they withdraw their support for Trump or continue to support him – either way, they still face a massive generic 12-point gap. Now, Trump has just come off one of the worst weeks in political history so you have to wonder if these huge poll advantages will dissipate somewhat before election day. On the other hand, Trump had one of the worst weeks in politics only a couple of weeks before this one so the chances that things could actually get worse are still pretty high.

Republicans came into this campaign believing it would be a “change” election, as it usually is after an eight year Presidential term. But I think they underestimated how much the GOP electorate was dissatisfied with everyone in politics, not just Democrats. A large part of that was brought on by the last three decades of Republicans and Fox pounding into their base that government is always bad and corrupt, while feeding the beast of white nationalism. The GOP forgot that they are part of government too. And the list of broken promises to the base, on abortion, on jobs, on real tax cuts for the middle class, is long. And now the GOP establishment is finding out that a big part of the change their base actually wants is new Republican leadership.