Thread: Tuesday Will Tell: Blue Wave or Red Tsunami? wheels are coming off for the Democrats.

Tuesday Will Tell: Blue Wave or Red Tsunami?

As the 2018 race enters the last lap, the wheels are coming off for the Democrats.

November 4, 2018
By Clarice Feldman

The polls are swinging wildly and voter enthusiasm seems higher than usual for midterms in recent memory or maybe ever.
Vice President Mike Pence predicts the Republicans will hold both houses and I tend to agree with him. In fact, I have a months-old dinner bet riding on his prediction coming to pass.
It’s not only that, freed of some of the more restrictive regulations and with tax cuts, the economy is booming and unemployment low, it’s a psychological thing. People are more optimistic and bullish than they were when Obama was president. I read this to mean they are willing to give the president’s party credit for their gains and want them to continue.
Rasmussen weighs in on the situation with a word of caution for those predicting a blue wave.

Democrats hold just a three-point lead on the latest Rasmussen Reports Generic Congressional Ballot which has a +/- 2 margin of error. Look for our final Generic Ballot Monday morning.
Just as in 2016, Democrats are more outspoken about how they’re going to vote in the upcoming elections than Republicans and unaffiliated voters are. Is it possible that another silent red wave is coming?

It’s true that the major media is uniformly opposed to Trump and his party, but as Rasmussen also notes, they have less sway on voters than they would hope:

The majority of voters believe the media is more interested in creating controversies about candidates than in reporting where they stand on the issues. Voters also think the media is trying to help Democrats in the upcoming elections which helps explain why Democratic voters are much bigger fans of election news coverage than others are.
[snip]
At week’s end, Trump’s job approval stands at 51% in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.
Most voters now commend the president for his economic leadership but are less impressed by his performance when it comes to foreign affairs. That’s also potentially good news for Republicans facing an election in which voters say Trump and the economy are the big issues.
Meanwhile, economic and consumer confidence continue to climb further into record territory.
[snip]
Forty-three percent (43%) of all voters say the country is headed in the right direction. This finding was in the mid- to upper 20s most weeks during Obama’s last year in the White House.

And why shouldn’t consumer confidence be up?

Charles V Payne
@cvpayne
Nov 2
Monster Jobs Report
250,000 Jobs
32,000 manufacturing
30,000 construction
5,000 mining
24,800 transportation & warehousing
But wages soaring 3.1% says it all -- look at that chart
Congratulations America

With incredible vigor, the President has flown around the country in support of his party’s candidates at rallies everywhere, drawing large crowds who wait for hours in line to get into the venues. These are not carried on most major channels and are barely reported, but it’s hard for me to find a better measure of support and enthusiasm.
Of course, for congressional races, local issues traditionally are more significant, but it is in that case that polls tend to be weakest. District-wide polling seems to me to always be suspect as there is not enough of it done because of the cost to form much of a basis for analysis.
My friend “Porchlight” watches polling carefully with a jaundiced eye and notes one such example:

Porchlight:
Polls are garbage. Look at this:
• GA-6 OCT 28-NOV 1 Siena College/New York Times 261RV
McBath DEM 46%
Handel GOP 41%
McBath+5
261 registered voters the week before the election, are you kidding me?
NYT/Siena again. 75% of House prognostication is based on the work of a single polling firm. Meanwhile prognosticators ignore hard early voting data.
Hell of a slender limb, folks.
Expect a lot of "what if the Reps hold the House?" stories in the next couple of days.

Citing Richard Baris, she posts other interesting reports, including this one:

One more. Here are new Trump approval numbers for the 18-44 age group in a certain House district:
Strongly approve
28.21%
Somewhat approve
28.21%
Somewhat disapprove
5.13%
Strongly disapprove
25.64%
Unsure
12.82%
Would you guess... CA-48?
Rohrabacher looking good in a must-win district.

The Kavanaugh accusations -- designed to appeal to women voters -- missed the mark except for the most blinkered:

When asked, “Do you think Democrats were genuinely concerned about Dr. Christine Ford and her allegations towards Judge Kavanaugh, or were they just using the allegation for political purposes in order to block Kavanaugh’s nomination?” about 55 percent of all U.S. voters say the Democrats were “just using the allegations” to stop Kavanaugh from getting on the Supreme Court.
About 55 percent of American women and 56 percent of men say the same, that Democrats were using the Kavanaugh allegations for political purposes. A minority of 45 percent of voters say the Democrats were “genuinely concerned” about Blasey Ford.
Despite the establishment media and Hollywood’s “Believe Women” campaign, the vast majority of American voters -- including 84 percent of women and 85 percent of men -- say when it comes to sexual harassment allegations, the standards of the legal due process should be applied. Only 15 percent of voters say the legal due process should be “relaxed.”

Blexit -- a movement by black voters to leave the Democratic Party -- has grown, and this, too, spells bad news for the Democrats, who depends on a balkanized base of suburban women, Hispanics and blacks to carry them to the finish line. The latest Rasmussen account I can find shows black approval for Trump is now up to 40%, which has to be sounding alarm bells for the DNC.
Nor can the Democrats rely on Hispanic voters:

Confidence that African Americans, Asians and Hispanics have in their personal finances improving over the next four years should be enough to help GOP leaders retain control of Congress in the midterm elections and reelect President Trump, according to a new survey.
While generally not fans of the president, the three key groups have a good feeling about their future and that should temper their concerns at the polls, said the survey from Zogby Analytics.

So who’s peddling the Blue Wave scenario?
I tend to agree with Roger Kimball that it is those who cannot believe they lost in 2016:

If only the Democrats sweep the midterm elections, they say to themselves, then we can put this awful anomaly, this hideous wrinkle in the order of the universe, behind us.
Some such sentiment, I believe, was behind all the talk of a coming “blue wave” last spring and into the summer. I never believed that there would be such a cerulean tsunami, especially one that would sweep Democrats into control of the Senate. The House? Maybe. But even that seems to me to be increasingly doubtful.
Adamant anti-Trump and NeverTrump commentators have circulated and then taken solace from the Blue Wave meme not because they are especially credulous, but because the election of Donald Trump offended their sense of existential propriety. The unforgivable datum is that Donald Trump, as I have said many times, was elected without their permission and indeed over their strenuous objections. That is the intolerable insult they cannot abide. It was an event that not only should not have happened but could not have happened. Hence the widespread access of denial, followed by anger, that greeted the advent of this great anomaly.
The midterms seem to offer a chance to set the universe back on its proper track.[snip] I do not of course know what is going to happen next Tuesday. But if, as seems to me increasingly likely, the Republicans hold the House, the anti-Trump and NeverTrump fraternity will be dealt a cruel blow. Not only will they have lost, not only will their confident predications have been in vain, but their entire sense of the way the world works will have been further undermined. The thing that was impossible, that could not have happened, will have turned out to be not an inexplicable singularity but a corroboration of a new dispensation -- a dispensation, moreover, that has no place for them.

While we cannot know how early voters voted, the number of Republicans voting early has shot up and shows a remarkable Republican advantage:

That blue wave we kept hearing about is being overcome by a crimson tsunami, at least according to early voting tallies as Republicans prove to be more motivated than Democrats.
NBC News reported that more people showed up to early voting, outpacing the 2014 midterms by leaps and bounds with a whopping 24,024,621 million ballots having already been counted.
For comparison, 2014 only had 12,938,596 counted by this time, putting 2018 at nearly double.
To be sure, both parties have been turned out in great number, but according to NBC, the Republicans are currently up with a two-point lead:
As of Wednesday, 43 percent of early voters are Republican and 41 percent are Democrats. At this point in 2016, 43 percent of early voters were Democrats and 40 percent were Republicans.
At this point in 2014, though, 44 percent were Republican and 40 percent were Democrats.

From closer to home, we have this:

With so many races so close, it won't take much to tip a contest one way or another. But the early voting by Republicans will probably force Democrats to walk back their predictions of a sweep and to tone down expectations of a "blue wave."

(It will also negate the advantage of late-breaking “surprise” bombshells.)
I hope I’m right. I want to win my dinner bet. If I don’t it will be something to watch the battle for the speaker’s seat between Nancy Pelosi and the Congressional Black Caucus (with its fair share of a dogs breakfast of racists, anti-Semites, lovers of communist dictators, corruptocrats and dopes), which thinks it’s their turn at the gavel.
Help me -- and the country -- go and vote for Republicans and keep the Trump America humming.

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