Nearly two out of three Americans polled by CBS rate the economy as either “very good” or “somewhat good,” while only nine percent rate the economy as “very bad.” The poll, CBS News Nation Tracker, which was released on Sunday, showed that respondents think the president is largely responsible for it: When asked, “How much do you think Donald Trump’s policies are responsible for the current state of the economy?” more than two out of three said “a great deal” or “somewhat” responsible.
The poll contained additional good news for Republicans heading into the November midterm elections: Seven out of 10 GOP voters told CBS that they prefer a candidate that the president supports.
These results are consistent with those from CNN earlier this month that showed that 57 percent of those surveyed think the country is doing well, up from 49 percent in February. As Dwight Schwab noted in Newsmax, “signs of the Democrats taking back the House have been replaced with more realistic goals of making moderate gains.” And even that isn’t likely to happen, wrote Schwab, as “there is a great deal of work to do if the Democrats wish to avoid a political embarrassment this November.”
Momentum of late clearly favors Republicans. On May 4, Rasmussen Reports noted that 41 percent of likely U.S. voters now believe the president will be reelected in 2020, up from 34 percent in late December. Those voters strongly believe that impeachment of the president “is not the best strategy for Democrats running for Congress.” Less than two weeks later, on May 16, Rasmussen reported that the repeated Trump-bashing by the Democrats and the mainstream media are having the opposite effect: Forty-three percent of those voters “think there is too much Trump-bashing going on in the popular culture today,” with 36 percent of them telling Rasmussen that they are, as a result, more likely to vote for a pro-Trump candidate in November.
In its generic poll on the House contest, RealClearPolitics now shows Democrats with a four-percent lead over Republicans, down from 13 percent just before Christmas. More telling, the Democrat margin has slipped by five points, while the Republicans have picked up four points.
This shift in momentum has caused a Democrat history professor at Princeton to sound the alarm. Julian Zelizer, writing for CNN on Sunday, counted the Republican advantages:
• Trump has played to his three primary constituencies: evangelical Christians, Second Amendment supporters, and anti-illegal immigration hardliners;
• The booming economy, with job growth being reflected in unemployment dropping to levels not seen in decades;
• Gerrymandering “also offers the GOP some insulation in the House by limiting the numbers of seats that are really in play” for the Democrats; and
• Major donors, including the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson, “are pouring money into campaigns to make sure that the deregulatory direction of policy under Trump is not brought to an end.”
Lamented the professor from Princeton, despite “the controversial presidency of Donald Trump, Republicans still have more than enough reason to believe that they stand a chance to ride rather than drown in the blue wave.”
When a liberal college professor admits that the momentum shift is putting the Democrat Party into difficulty, and dares to say it in the pages of far-left CNN, one can take comfort that the shift is real, and bodes well for Republicans to retain firm control of the House in November.
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].
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