Monday Update: Reasons for Republicans to Worry
June 24, 2024
I apologize for not being able to get the second youth voting post out last week. It was an unusually busy week of work for me. That post will come sometime this week.
I am working on the second piece in the labor politics series. Hopefully, I will finish it and get it out later this week.
Next week I will be in London. I will report on the UK and French elections while I am there. The week after that I will be on vacation (week of July 8th) and back to work in the middle of the week of July 15th.
Now, onto the interesting stuff!
Politico has a piece this morning outlining the reasons why a lot of Republicans are quietly concerned about November, including:
The Republican underperformance in a special House election in Ohio where “massively outspent Democrat Michael Kripchak erased 19 points from Trump’s 2020 margin of victory — still losing, but becoming the first Democratic candidate to carry the blue-collar Mahoning County since Trump painted it red in 2020.”
According to the Washington Post, Kripchak lost by ten points, but at times it looked the election would be even closer. “According to data crunched by Daily Kos Elections, the 19-point over-performance is the biggest thus far across six Republican vs. Democrat special congressional elections this cycle. Democrats have over-performed Biden’s 2020 showing in four of those six races, including three times by double digits.”
Politico notes that “Democrats are quick to point out that polls matter less than voting results, and on that matter, they have been beating expectations in a string of special elections this cycle. Before the Ohio contest, now-Rep. Tim Kennedy in April won a special House election in New York, outpacing Biden’s 2020 performance in the district by about 6 percentage points. Before that, now-Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) flipped a seat previously held by disgraced former Republican Rep. George Santos.”
The nomination this weekend of a far-right candidate for lieutenant governor in Indiana. Micah Beckwith, a Christian nationalist pastor who has said that God told him he sent “those riots to Washington” on January 6th and that it was God’s “hand at work,” narrowly defeated a state representative endorsed by Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN).
According to Politico: “In a memo obtained by POLITICO, James Bopp Jr., the Indiana lawyer who advises National Right to Life, wrote that Trump’s results in the state’s May primary pose ‘danger’ for the party’s own ticket. ‘Trump got 78% of the Republican primary vote and [Nikki] Haley got 22%,’ he wrote. ‘Now there is very good reason to think that 10 to 12% of that vote were Democrats, leaving 10% of Republicans not convinced to support Trump.’”
The memo shows concern for Republican’s ability to hold onto the governor’s seat and, amazingly, Braun’s seat. Bopp suggests that the Indiana Senate seat could be in play as a result of nominating Beckwith.1
Democratic Senate candidates are leading in Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.
We have discussed the polling here before, and nothing has changed. Democratic Senate candidates continue to lead their Republican opponents. They are also outpacing Biden in battleground states, which has changed some Democratic field organizing to focus on a “reverse coattails” strategy.
New polling from Fox News that shows a dramatic increase in Biden’s support among independents. Biden is +9 among independents in the latest poll, which is an 11-point swing from May (which was Trump +2). Biden is now leading overall in the Fox News poll, 50-48.
A new Gallup poll found abortion rights resonating as an election issue.
“Specifically, nearly twice as many pro-choice voters (40%) as pro-life voters (22%) say they will only vote for a candidate who agrees with them on abortion. This is the third consecutive year that abortion-centric pro-choice voters have outnumbered abortion-centric pro-life voters in the U.S., marking a reversal of the pro-life advantage between 1996 and 2020.”
Polling is showing that Trump’s felony conviction is hurting him among independents.
A recent poll from Ipsos found that 21 percent of independents said Trump’s conviction made them less like to support Trump and that it would be an important factor in determining their vote. It is hard to know how important any factor is in a voter’s decision to cast a vote until they actually do so. However, this is not speculative the way pre-conviction polling was. These voters were asked how they felt once Trump had actually been convicted. Their reactions are how they are feeling now, not what they think they might feel should some event happen in the future.
Some interesting quotes from Politico:
“I do think this is probably about the time that we should legitimately see a reaction to the guilty verdict, so it certainly makes sense,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist and former executive director of the state Republican Party in Michigan.
Tom McCabe, the GOP chair of swingy Mahoning County, Ohio, put[s] it: “This election is going to be decided on the margins, and short-term, his conviction is hurting him in the polling.”
Braun is retiring from the Senate to run for governor. It’s unclear whether Bopp was referring to the Senate race (he seemed to be referring to the entire Republican ticket) or just the governor’s race.