Are Republicans Blowing the Midterms?Americans don’t like the Biden Administration and are ready to hear the Republicans’ case. But do they have one?
By Jeffrey H. Anderson
August 23, 2022
“Candidate quality” is the term of the moment. The prevailing explanation for Democrats’ relative success in recent Senate-race polling, advanced last week by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), is that Republican voters have nominated too many Trump-backed outsider candidates who simply aren’t up to McConnell’s establishment standards. It’s true that inexperienced candidates have additional challenges—although Republican Glenn Youngkin, who’d never held elected office of any sort, prevailed over Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the former governor, in blue-hued Virginia just last year.
But is that really all that’s going on here or is something else in play?
An article published in the Journal of Politics a little over a decade ago noted, “Polls early in the midterm year project a normal vote result in November. But as the campaign progresses, vote preferences almost always move toward the out party.” Why? The authors write, “The shift accords with ‘balance’ theory, where the midterm campaign motivates some to vote against the party of the president in order to achieve policy moderation.”
According to this explanation, voters will move toward Republicans as the year progresses in hopes of checking Joe Biden. This bodes well for the GOP. It doesn’t really explain, however, why Republicans are doing poorly in the polling right now. It appears that at least two other important factors might be in play.
First, Republicans haven’t provided much of a check on Biden this summer, and voters seem to have noticed.
On July 25, the website FiveThirtyEight was giving Republicans a slight edge (51 percent to 49 percent) in its forecast as to which party will control the Senate next year. Four weeks later, it now gives Democrats almost a two-to-one edge (63 percent to 37 percent). In between, 17 mostly establishment Republicans (including McConnell) voted for the $280 billion crony capitalism bill called the CHIPS Act—which even Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) voted against and labeled “corporate welfare.”
Republicans’ unforced error then paved the way for Democrats to pass the half-trillion-dollar gift to eco-billionaires and IRS agents that is the Inflation Reduction Act (which was apparently named on Opposite Day).
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/23/are-republicans-blowing-the-midterms/
