Polls suggest House Democrats will buck midterm curse and add to their ranks
By Kevin Walling, opinion contributor — 04/19/21 10:00 AM EDT Conventional wisdom in Washington is that the party in control of the White House usually loses any number of congressional seats in the midterms. In 1994, President Bill Clinton saw his House majority collapse with the Democrats losing 54 seats and the speaker’s gavel, something that had held true since the Truman Administration. After wresting control back from the GOP in 2006 during the final two years of the George W. Bush Administration, Democrats faced a similar blood bath during the 2010 midterms losing 63 seats in what President Barack Obama aptly described as a “shellacking.â€
With one of the slimmest majorities for any new president in modern history, President Joe Biden is already banking on the popularity of his legislation and executive actions to buoy Democratic prospects heading into the elections. Polling from last month following the passage of the American Rescue Plan indicated that 63 percent of Americans, including 58 percent of independents, supported the $1.9 trillion package passed with just Democratic votes. Similarly, according to a new poll out from The New York Times, Biden’s new infrastructure proposal, the American Jobs Act, “garners support from two in three Americans, and from seven in ten independent voters.†Interestingly enough, the plan has the support of more than 30 percent of registered Republican voters according to the same poll.
In addition to the broad level of support behind the Biden administration’s two landmark pieces of legislation, new polling from Morning Consult from earlier in the month demonstrates the total dominance of Democrats over Republicans on the most critical issues facing the American people. During the 2018 midterms, healthcare was the leading issue that drove voters to the polls — and that was before an international pandemic ravaged our country. According to data from that Morning Consult poll, Democrats in Congress hold a +25 percent advantage over their GOP colleagues when voters are asked who they trust more to handle COVID-19 — 51 percent to 26 percent. Similarly, Democrats hold a +19 percent advantage when it comes to healthcare writ-large and a +20 percent advantage when it comes to protecting Social Security and Medicare. Even more damning for Congressional Republicans is the fact that voters give House Democrats a five percent advantage on who they trust on issues of the economy, an issue that was squarely in the Republican column in recent elections, including 2020.
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https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/548924-polls-suggest-house-democrats-will-buck-midterm-curse-and-add-to-their-ranks
