Morning Consult, founded in 2013, is not the typical political opinion pollster. Instead of polling small samples designed to reflect the general public’s opinion on political issues (ranging from 500 to 1,500 contacts and then extracting results), the company surveys 5,000 people every day.
For its latest survey, “2018 Midterms,” the company said the results were compiled from surveys of more than 275,000 registered voters across the United States from February 1 through the end of April. And it’s bad news for Democrats hoping to take back the Senate:
Across key Senate states, Republicans lead in the generic ballot in Democratic Senate-held seats like Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia.
And there are three more where Republicans could knock out Democratic senators, for a total possible gain of nine seats in November. Morning Consult asked, “Do you think [your Senator] deserves reelection? Options: Deserves Reelection or Time for a New Person.” Here are the results of that massive survey for each contest:
Florida: Democrat incumbent Senator Bill Nelson: 31 percent “deserves reelection”; 46 percent “time for a new person”;
Indiana: Democrat incumbent Senator Joe Donnelly: 30 percent “deserves reelection”; 43 percent “time for a new person”;
Minnesota: Democrat incumbent Senator Tina Smith: 25 percent “deserves reelection”; 30 percent “time for a new person”;
Missouri: Democrat incumbent Senator Claire McCaskill: 29 percent “deserves reelection”; 53 percent “time for a new person”;
North Dakota: Democrat incumbent Senator Heidi Heitkamp: 35 percent “deserves reelection”; 49 percent “time for a new person”;
Ohio: Democrat incumbent Senator Sharrod Brown: 32 percent “deserves reelection”; 42 percent “time for a new person”;
Pennsylvania: Democrat incumbent Senator Bob Casey: 30 percent “deserves reelection”; 45 percent “time for a new person”;
Wisconsin: Democrat incumbent Senator Tammy Baldwin: 34 “deserves reelection”; 48 percent “time for a new person”; and
West Virginia: Democrat incumbent Senator Joe Manchin: 32 percent “deserves reelection”; 53 percent “time for a new person.”
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There is one Republican who is in trouble, according to Morning Consult: Republican incumbent Senator Dean Heller from Nevada: 25 percent say he “deserves reelection” while 50 percent say it’s “time for a new person” to represent the state in the Senate.
Ben Shapiro, writing for the Daily Wire, took a different approach but with the same results. He looked at polls where Democrats are being challenged by Republican candidates and concluded that “in the best-case scenario for Republicans … they could win up to nine additional Senate seats.”
What about the House? A series of polls aggregated by Real Clear Politics shows the Democrats with a “generic” advantage of 6.7 points over Republicans. But that advantage has been cut in half since December, and Morning Consult’s numbers show it to be even narrower: 50 to 45 Democrats over Republicans, just a five-point difference.
This narrowing was reported by The New American on Tuesday showing support by millennials for the Democratic Party melting away.
And on Friday Rasmussen Reports said that 41 percent of those polled “now believe the president will be reelected in 2020, up from 34 percent in late December while those thinking (hoping) he’ll be defeated has shrunk from 31 percent four months ago to just 25 percent currently.
All of which has caught the attention of Democrat pollsters who have been watching their House advantage narrow. Pollsters for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women’s Vote Action Fund have conceded that the party’s “momentum has stalled in the last few months.”
And it’s no wonder. As the Democrats continue to focus on destroying Donald Trump — i.e., “Russia Russia Russia” and now “Stormy” — it has left the field open for real conversations about real issues. As the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti, noted:
The more the [Democrat] party falls for the self-flattery, empty rhetoric, question begging, and maze-like complexity of media narratives — not to mention the more it succumbs to the fever-dream of impeachment [of the president] — the less likely it is to recoup the power it once enjoyed.
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
Photo: Clipart.com
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