Summary:
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Republicans are on track for a landslide in the Senate contests that are believed to be competitive, according to the G.O.P. pollsters and operatives I spoke with this week: Even less well-known candidates like Blake Masters in Arizona will be carried into office by a predicted wave.
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Voters of all races, but particularly men, who are less educated have tended to lean toward the Republicans in recent years, while more educated voters—particularly white women—have gravitated toward the Democrats.
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The Republican strategist informed me that Hispanic men are the fastest-moving demographic inside the electorate, followed by Black men.
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Republicans have a history of emphasising a straightforward narrative regarding inflation, namely that the White House was unaware of its ascent and how it affected regular Americans. “
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Inflation is the big federal story,” the Republican strategist told me. “
I discussed the Georgia Senate race with a top Republican political consultant on Wednesday afternoon. Both parties have a stake in that election strategically, but Democrats have a unique symbolic connection to it. Raphael Warnock, the incumbent, has held Martin Luther King, Jr.’s pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta for many years. He is viewed as a future Democratic Party national leader, but he still has a chance to lose to Republican Herschel Walker, a scandal-plagued former football player. According to the Republican adviser, Warnock’s chances are even worse than several recent public surveys indicate. The Republican strategist informed me that Herschel Walker is unquestionably ahead in every private poll conducted in America. Never one.
Republicans are on track for a landslide in the Senate contests that are believed to be competitive, according to the G.O.P. pollsters and operatives I spoke with this week: Even less well-known candidates like Blake Masters in Arizona will be carried into office by a predicted wave. Mehmet Oz will defeat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and not just by a point or two. Adam Laxalt appears to have a good chance of defeating Democratic incumbent senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada. One Republican strategist told me, “He won’t deserve it, but I think at this point he slips into a Senate seat.” Some high-profile races in which G.O.P. candidates were previously favourited now appear to be potential landslides in the eyes of these Republican insiders, including Kari Lake’s quest for governor of Arizona and J. D. Vance’s Senate bid in Ohio. And some contests that appeared to be out of the question, like the Senate campaign in New Hampshire of election sceptic Don Bolduc, now appear to be in play. The phrase “bloodbath” kept cropping up in these discussions.
I wanted to hear the G.O.P.’s perspective on the election, so I spoke with Republican pollsters and consultants who were involved in numerous contests around the nation. (I met with some of their Democratic counterparts as well, keeping their identities secret to give a check on their accounts.) I was curious as to what they believed the earlier polls had missed and how a race that had appeared to be close for much of the year could end up being a rout for the Republicans.
These conversations made one thing clear: many of these professionals had spent a significant portion of the summer trying to control the abortion debate, which had become the chaotic component of the election following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, in June. It gave the Democratic party a surge of energy and support, but it also interestingly altered polling. The Republican strategist explained to me that after Dobbs, progressives began picking up the phone at rates seen in the ’90s. Responding to a political poll turned became a way to express one’s political identity.
This Republican claimed that he and a colleague had looked at polls in which they had access to voter information and came to the conclusion that up to 60% of Democratic poll respondents this summer were so-called super voters, or those who vote in every election, even though these voters typically make up about a third of the general electorate in each party. Republicans did not exhibit this impact, according to him.) Since their primary super voters are calling them and informing them that this is what they care about, Democratic candidates are being instructed, “You should talk about January 6th, democracy being on the ballot, and trans rights,” he claimed.
Still, Republicans were fixated on coming up with a persuasive solution to the abortion debate. “I had candidates who wanted to know the same thing, week after week, how do we explain this abortion problem?” said a pollster who worked in numerous races throughout the nation. They’re humiliating me over it. “And what they determined is, we don’t have a decent response,” the pollster continued. What is, is what is.
In the end, Republicans chose to wait it out rather than find a political solution to the fact that many of the voters they sought to win were against them abortion. I was informed by a Democratic strategist that a surge in cash following the Supreme Court ruling allowed Democratic campaigns to air television advertising “much, much early” in swing areas. He continued by saying that as a result, Democrats were unusually interested in politics, the Democratic base was overrepresented in polls, and swing voters saw a disproportionate amount of Democratic advertisements. That, he claimed, is what causes the blue mirage in the summer.
At the same time, it seemed likely that some voter groups were underrepresented in the polls. Voters of all races, but particularly men, who are less educated have tended to lean toward the Republicans in recent years, while more educated voters—particularly white women—have gravitated toward the Democrats. In terms of polls, these changes have led to an imbalance, where one of the most visible political groups—one that was highly galvanised by the Dobbs decision—had gone toward Democrats, while one of the least visible groups—one that was less apparent—had shifted toward Republicans. The Republican strategist informed me that Hispanic men are the fastest-moving demographic inside the electorate, followed by Black men. You wish to speak with them by phone. “Good luck,” they said.
Arizona is like ground zero for that trend, a Democratic pollster once told me. Many Hispanics seem to be gravitating toward Laxalt, in my opinion. The Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams is underperforming among Black men, according to this Democrat, who also believed that Abrams’ Republican opponent, Governor Brian Kemp, “is going to do a terrific job gaining Black voters compared to his 2018 performance.”
Republicans couldn’t wait to move on from the big social issues, while Democrats kept bringing them up. The Republican strategist said, “The reason that Democrats have fucked this up is that they won’t stop talking about abortion,” in reference to the Hispanic vote switching to the G.O.P. in Nevada. And the reason they messed up with Blacks is that they won’t stop bringing up the subject of abortion. They appear to be a two-issue party. Trump and this are both. They cannot halt. There may not be anything else available.
A trick that long looked difficult to pull off, the developing Democratic coalition has made the party both more prosperous and more progressive. But it has also made the party more vulnerable, particularly among voters from the working class. Republicans have a history of emphasising a straightforward narrative regarding inflation, namely that the White House was unaware of its ascent and how it affected regular Americans. “Inflation is the big federal story,” the Republican strategist told me. “A lot of blame belongs on the White House because the White House just wished this would go away instead of saying, ‘We know it’s real, we know it’s a problem, it’s happening everywhere, we’re going to do everything to fix it, but we can’t fix it immediately.'”
Republican governors might also make some policy gestures to support the way they spoke about inflation in some politically contested regions of the country, particularly the booming Sun Belt states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. Georgia’s governor, Kemp, extended the state’s gas tax vacation in July. If re-elected, he pledged in August to use the state budget surplus of $2 billion to provide property tax and income tax rebates. The following week, he declared that low-income Georgians would receive checks for $350 each, made out of $1.2 billion in federal COVID funds. Kemp praised Georgia’s historically low unemployment rate and the highest number of people employed in its history during his final debate with Abrams.
Analysis by: Advocacy Unified Network
