‘The numbers favour a massive Republican victory’

Forty is President Biden’s job approval rating among likely voters, according to the final Democracy Institute/Express.co.uk midterms poll. Historically, a first term president with an approval rating below 50 percent has doomed the incumbent party to (often heavy) defeat in the midterms. Since 1966, first term presidents with approval ratings below 50 percent have lost an average of 40 House seats and three Senate seats. Since 1994, such presidents have lost on average 51 House seats and four Senate seats.Will Biden’s Democrats buck the trend? It is unlikely given the president is so clearly a hindrance, rather than a help, to his party’s electoral prospects.Six is the net seat gain Republicans require to become the majority party in the House of Representatives.The 435-seat chamber is currently divided between 220 Democrats and 212 Republicans with three vacancies. In 2020, the Democrats won the national House vote by 3.1 percent, yet the Republicans gained 13 seats, such is the efficiency of the Republicans’ congressional vote. Joe Biden is so clearly a hindrance, rather than a help, to his party’s electoral prospects (Image: GETTY)Today, the Republicans enjoy a five point lead in our poll’s generic congressional ballot. Such a lead should translate into a 33- to 53-seat gain, which would give the Republicans between 245 and 265 seats in the new Congress inaugurated in January 2023.One is all that the Republicans require in new seats to gain a majority in the Senate.Currently, the Senate is divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. In the event of a tie vote, Vice President Kamala Harris, in her constitutional role as president of the Senate, casts the deciding, and often consequential, vote.Should the Republicans successfully defend all of their current seats, which our poll projects they will do, a Republican victory in any of the seats currently held by Democrats will remove the deciding vote from Harris. Our final poll projects the Republicans will net at least four seats, specifically Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire, and possibly one or two more from among Colorado, Connecticut, and Washington.Another metric by which to identify the election’s probable outcome is to ‘follow the money,’ as advised by Deep Throat, the anonymous government source in ‘All the President’s Men,’ the iconic movie about the Watergate scandal. Following the money in an American political campaign is an excellent guide to the direction of the electoral winds.In a campaign, ‘money’ refers not only to a campaign or party’s financial assets. It is, in addition, short hand for the time, energy, and manpower available to a candidate, his or her campaign team, volunteers, the respective local, state, and national party organisations, and those of the campaign’s most influential patrons and supporters.Following these actors’ financial and non-financial decision-making tells us what is really happening at the coal face of their campaigns.The most revealing development is that the Democrats are playing defence almost everywhere on the electoral map. They are targeting their party’s resources at defending incumbent senators and congressmen in such staunchly Blue states as California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington.The congressional Democrats’ campaign arms are sending millions of dollars and the party’s most popular surrogates to traditionally safe Democratic states and districts. To that end, the Democrats are currently spending 80 percent of their money defending the seats held by their own congressmen and senators. In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by double digit margins in many of these deep Blue districts.The past week witnessed Barack Obama appearing in campaign advertisements and campaigning in-person for the party’s embattled incumbent governors in Michigan and New York.Earlier this year, in neither state was the Democrat expected to face serious competition for the Governor’s Mansion. Yet, both races are now extremely close.In stark contrast, the Republicans are on offence almost everywhere around the country. Given their healthy poll lead, Republicans could be playing an ultra-cautious ‘prevent defense,’ in American football parlance, to protect their leads in a growing number of Red states and Red districts, thereby guaranteeing themselves a modest win.Instead, they have chosen to press their advantage and hope to run up the score in the campaign’s final days to secure a historic triumph.The Republicans are spending 80 percent of their money on offence. They are targeting 74 congressional districts now held by Democrats. On average, these districts were won by Biden by six points over Trump. Biden won seven of these districts by double digit margins, while some of the other targeted districts voted for Biden by as much as 20 points.Most Democratic senatorial candidates in swing states have experienced massive financial advantages over their respective Republican opponents.During the last fundraising quarter, Democratic candidates outraised their Republican opponents $193 million to $104 million, an almost 2:1 ratio. In some statewide races, the ratio has been 5:1 or 10:1, or even 20:1.But the national Red wave is so strong, this huge money advantage has not saved the Democrats.One of the Democrats’ problems is the source of their money. Most state-wide Democratic candidates receive the lion’s share of their money from wealthy, out-of-state sources, especially the entertainment industry, Wall Street, and Big Tech. But most state-wide Republican candidates receive their money from small dollar donations from in-state residents. This is a crucial distinction because small dollar donations are a far better barometer of a candidate’s actual support among the electorate.Following the money also reveals how the Democrats wasted much of their financial advantage.In order to negate comprehensive Republicans attacks on the Democrats’ economic mismanagement and their alleged indifference to skyrocketing crime, the Democrats’ messaging needed to acknowledge these problems and present the voters with pragmatic prescriptions to remedy, or at least realistically ameliorate, both problems.Instead, Democrats have pretended these problems either do not exist or are the fault of anyone and everyone, foreign and domestic, but themselves.In an October 18 interview with MSNBC, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed polls showing inflation and crime are voters’ top concerns. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision that effectively legalised abortion across America, she has insisted abortion was the most important issue, especially to female voters.In recent months, Democrats spent $103 million, far more than on any other issue, in a failed attempt to switch the dominant campaign narrative from inflation and crime to abortion.In some swing states, such as Nevada, Democratic advertising has been almost exclusively devoted to this issue.Liberal journalists acknowledge that the party wasted its donors’ money. ‘Did Democrats place a losing bet on abortion?’ was the question posed in print this week by CNN Editor-at-large Chris Cillizza. Following the Supreme Court ruling in June, my article forecast the Democrats’ failure on abortion. The Democrats spent only $10 million on inflation-related advertising; one-fifth of the amount Republicans spent on the issue. The latter spent nearly as much on advertising about rising crime as inflation. Republicans spent a further $63 million on negative advertising about Biden.The tone deafness of the current Democratic leadership was abundantly illustrated by Biden’s November 2 prime time election speech. Only six days before an election stretching beyond the reach of his party’s candidates, the president’s speech made no mention of inflation, petrol prices, violent crime, the migrant crisis, the fentanyl epidemic, or the challenge presented by China.He chose instead to double down on the inflammatory, electorally unhelpful rhetoric he unleashed in Philadelphia two months earlier. Biden’s angry closing argument warned a Republican victory could set the nation on a ‘path to chaos.’ His bottom line: if you do not vote Democrat, you are an enemy of democracy.Conservatives often accuse tax-and-spend liberal politicians of attempting to bribe the voters with their own money. Biden prefers to coerce, extort, and threaten them, which is a perplexing electoral calculation for the hapless, unpopular leader of a paranoid governing party.When one party focuses upon an issue of secondary importance to most voters, who are in turn berated by that party’s leader, while the other party focuses like a laser beam upon voters’ highest priorities, what happens next is entirely predictable.At a recent White House event promoting infrastructure legislation, Biden declared, in characteristic fashion, ‘The future is about the future.’ Many of his fellow Democratic officeholders will have no future after the midterms. For their partisan opponents, however, the future is bright because the immediate future is painted Republican red.