Huge shift in midterm polling
Immediately after the draft memo leaked earlier this year revealing that the Supreme Court planned to overturn Roe v. Wade, multiple polls showed the Democrats having made gains in the generic midterm ballot. Now that the court has indeed made the unpopular and psychotic move of overturning Roe v. Wade, we’re seeing even bigger shifts in polling.
In the immediate aftermath of this week’s ruling, the Democrats opened up a seven point lead in the generic midterm ballot, according to the Marist poll. This is a ten point shift since April. We’ll have to wait for additional polling outlets to update their numbers in the wake of the Supreme Court bombshell. But if we see similar numbers to Marist, it’ll put the Democrats in a strong position to win the midterms.
These midterms were supposed to be an automatic Republican win, because the opposition party historically always wins the midterms after a new President takes office. But the Republicans are blowing their advantage, which is why polling says it’ll be close. Close elections come down to which base puts in the most work.
Even with the new polling which suggests the Democrats have a seven point lead on the generic midterm ballot, we’ll want to play it safe and subtract five points to account for voter suppression, gerrymandering, and polling errors. That would perhaps give the Democrats a very narrow two point lead.
The worst thing you can do is sit around lamenting about how awful it is that the Democrats might “only” win by two points, even after this Supreme Court ruling and Republican villainy. That may be true, but it’s a waste of your time, and it just demotivates others.
The bottom line is that historically speaking, we were supposed to lose these midterms, and lose them badly. Instead, the wind is blowing so strongly in our direction, it’s going to be highly competitive. That’s the positive news we need to build momentum on.
I don’t know about you, but if you tell me I’ve got a 50-50 chance of winning a battle for all the marbles, and that the odds of winning will go sharply up or down based on how much work I put in, I’m going to fight like hell – not sit around lamenting and fretting about losing.
So how do you fight? We already know the nine competitive Senate races that’ll decide the majority. Flip these: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina. Keep these: Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire.
If all of these go our way, we’ll have 55 Senate seats. We need 52 seats to make Manchin and Sinema irrelevant, and exempt everything we want to do from the filibuster. So we’ll aim for 55 seats, and our fallback is 52. How do we win these races?
1) Donate, if you have money.
2) Volunteer, if you have time.
3) If you have neither, share donation and volunteer links so others will see them
4) Knock off the defeatist talk, which demotivates people and costs us votes.
5) Stop bashing the Democrats, which costs us votes.
That’s right, you can help us win without even investing your time or money. All you have to do is share the links. If three of your followers see it and act on it, you’ve made a difference.
For those of you who are ready to work, visit these nine links and sign up for their mailing lists. That way you’ll be kept up to date on how to donate or volunteer, what messaging to share, and so on. Sign up for all nine of these right now:
Pennsylvania – Ohio – Florida – North Carolina – Wisconsin – Arizona – Georgia – New Hampshire – Nevada
