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Morning Consult Polls Show Trump Approval Plummeting In Key States

Morning Consult Polls Show Trump Approval Plummeting In Key States

This is not good news for Trump’s reelection hopes.

According to Morning Consult’s daily tracking of Trump’s approval in all 50 states, Trump’s popularity in crucial swing states has plummeted since he took office in 2017.

For example, according to the Morning Consult polls, Trump’s approval is underwater by double digits in three states he won in 2016 and that he’ll need to win again if he has any hope of a second term. They are:

  • Wisconsin, where just 42 percent of voters approve of his job in office, as opposed to 55 percent who disapprove. That’s a 19-point drop since Trump took office.
  • In Michigan, 42 percent approve of Trump while 54 percent disapprove — a 20-point decline in popularity since Trump took office.
  • And in Iowa, Trump has seen a 21-point drop in his popularity since taking office, with 42 percent of voters approving of his job performance and another 54 percent disapproving.

Trump is also underwater in approval ratings in Pennsylvania and Arizona, two other states he very narrowly won in 2016. If Trump also lost those states in 2020, there’s no path to him winning the White House.

Some of Trump’s problems may stem from his trade war with China and Mexico — which especially hurt Midwest and Rust Belt swing states, given that the tariffs are hurting car manufacturers and farmers that are concentrated in these swing areas.

Of course, it’s very early in the election cycle. There’s still more than a year until voters head to the polls, and Democrats have yet to pick a nominee.

But Trump’s lagging approval rating in these key states is not a great sign for his reelection chances in 2020.

Published with permission of The American Independent. 

Democrats’ Hopes For Senate Majority Hang By A Slim Thread

Democrats’ Hopes For Senate Majority Hang By A Slim Thread

Published with permission from AlterNet.

The Democrats’ ability to appoint and confirm the next U.S. Supreme Court majority, which will shape the court’s values for years, is hanging by a thread and will be determined by U.S. Senate races in a half-dozen presidential swing states.

These are the same states that play outsized roles in the presidential race, but the latest polls and analyses suggest that Democrats, at best, may retake the Senate by one seat or possibly a 50-50 tie. That stalemate that would have to be broken by the vice president, who also serves as Senate president, and would cast tie-breaking votes. If Donald Trump were elected and Democrats don’t win that one-seat majority, the Supreme Court could turn to the far right.

That edgy scenario is the latest takeaway from seasoned pollsters who look for repetitive patterns in surveys and who don’t have a partisan record. They say the GOP’s current 54-46 majority is heading back toward Democrats—but by the slimmest of margins.

“The summary is this,” writes the team at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “With more than two months to go, two GOP seats are severely endangered (Illinois and Wisconsin). Just below that duo, Democrats are now slightly favored in traditionally red Indiana while Republican incumbents in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are struggling to overcome likely Clinton victories in their states. Republican incumbents are ahead in Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, and North Carolina, but upsets cannot be ruled out.”

That forecast, which is consistent with the Cook Political Report, means Democrats will have 50 seats, Republicans 49 seats, with one state—Nevada—remaining too close to call as the campaign’s final two-month stretch begins.

This assessment is a much more dicey scenario than many Democrats realize because Clinton has been ahead of Donald Trump in polls since the Democratic Convention, even as she’s slipped a bit in the past week. The bottom line is that even if Clinton appears on track to win the popular vote and Electoral College, the appointment and confirmation of the next Supreme Court majority is in tight play.

The Republicans, especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are well aware of this reality. McConnell has led that party’s obstructionist response to President Obama’s latest Supreme Court nomination by refusing to hold Judiciary Committee hearings on his nominee, federal appeals judge Merrick Garland.

“Hillary Clinton and the leftwing mainstream media are out to completely transform the political landscape. They will do ANYTHING they can to deceive the American people and trick their way into the White House and controlling the U.S. Senate,” McConnell said in a typically panicked fundraising email this week. “If dedicated Republicans like you don’t step up, the consequences could be utterly DISASTROUS for our Republican senators. Will you help us fight back, before it’s too late?”

Big Money Focuses on the Senate

The big political money circles know the Senate stakes, and at least on the Republican side, are stepping up in ways not seen in the presidential race. A newanalysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School tracked spending in the eight most competitive Senate race and found partisan efforts roughly matched.

“The highest-spending group through mid-August, according to data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), is the Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic shadow party super PAC with close ties to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid,” Brennan noted. “Senate Majority has spent $19.6 million across the eight closest Senate races, including $9.6 million in Ohio alone. The group is on pace to match its spending from 2014, when it was the biggest non-party spender in the most competitive Senate contests. An affiliated non-profit, Majority Forward, which does not disclose its donors, has spent an additional $2.7 million.”

But the Republican side, operating through the more shadowy groups—created after the conservative-majority Supreme Court’s latest round of campaign finance deregulation prompted front groups that do not have to reveal donors’ names—tracks the Democrats.

“The Republican analogues to the Democratic groups are the nonprofit One Nation and its affiliated super PAC, Senate Leadership Fund,” Brennan continued. “Both are run by Steven Law, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Yet unlike the Democrats, the Republicans have so far done most of their spending—$22 million in the close Senate races—through the nonprofit One Nation, which does not report its spending or its donors to the FEC. Another $3 million has come through the Senate Leadership Fund, for a total of $25 million.”

The latest state-by-state Senate race forecasts are now as follows:

Wisconsin and Illinois GOP incumbents threatened. First-term senators Mark Kirk of Illinois and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin face particularly strong Democrats. In Illinois, Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran, is seen as benefiting from a traditionally blue state that is likely to strongly support Clinton. In Wisconsin, ex-Sen. Russ Feingold, seeking a return, has never trailed in a public poll, analysts note. Trump, meanwhile, has not been targeting either state for presidential campaign efforts.

Democratic edge inIndiana, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. These state’s races are leaning Democratic. In Indiana, where Gov. Mike Pence has been picked as Trump’s running mate, Democrats got a break when former Sen. Evan Bayh decided to run for his old seat. His name recognition and moderate reputation are said to be in Bayh’s favor. Meanwhile, the two GOP incumbents in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, Kelly Ayotte and Pat Toomey, are doing better than Trump in polls, “but not by enough to win,” the University of Virginia Center for Politics analysis said. Polls show Pennsylvania’s Katy McGinty, former chief of staff to that state’s governor, and New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, taking leads in polling averages.

The toss-up state: Nevada. This race has been too close to call for weeks. Republican Congressman Joe Heck faces Nevada’s former attorney general, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. This state has been too close to call for reasons that go beyond the tight polling. Trump is well known, not just as a casino owner but as one now involved in a nasty labor dispute. But the key question hinges on what the state’s large Latino population will do when it comes to registering to vote and turning out on Election Day.

GOP strength in Ohio and Florida. Democrats thought they had a chance to pick up a Florida seat after Marco Rubio said he was bored as a senator and was running for president. But after losing badly to Trump in Florida’s spring presidential primary, he decided to run for Senate and this past week Rubio strongly won in the Senate primary. Florida polls now have him doing better than Trump, putting him about 5 percent ahead of the Democratic candidate, Congressman Patrick Murphy.

In Ohio, polls find the Democratic candidate, former Gov. Ted Strickland, is not being carried forward by Clinton’s lead. Strickland was governor from 2007 to 2011, the heart of the Great Recession, which has been one line for GOP attacks, but Republican incumbent Sen. Rob Portman and his allies have spent more on TV ads than any other Senate race. Portman leads Strickland by 8 to 11 points, according to a variety of polls.

Back to the Supreme Court

These polls, analyses and projections point to the uneasy reality that the next Senate majority, which will confirm the next Supreme Court justice, hangs by a thread—a likely one-vote margin or tie-breaker by the next Senate president, the sitting vice president.

While the 2016 election has defied many predictions, the latest surveys from presidential swing states now show a tighter race for the Senate majority than for the White House. That majority will determine the next Supreme Court majority, which will likely preside for many years to come, and in many ways will be as consequential as who occupies the White House.

 

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of “Count My Vote: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting” (AlterNet Books, 2008).

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton greets audience members during a campaign stop at the 49th Annual Salute to Labor in Hampton, Illinois, U.S. September 5, 2016.  REUTERS/Brian Snyder

A Bitter Political Summer In Wisconsin

A Bitter Political Summer In Wisconsin

MADISON, Wisc. — The fields of corn growing across the state looked knee-high by the Fourth of July, as they say here, but politics is parched in the heartland as Wisconsin prepares for another furious showdown in this fall election harvest. Call it a civil war, that’s what it feels like.

I knew this place as a girl. I love Wisconsin, but don’t know it anymore.

The blue-leaning state is already a major battleground in play in 2016, with presumptive presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump vying for very different voter bases. Clinton will court the two cities, Madison and Milwaukee, while Trump may concentrate on the rest of the state, branding and sneering at the city folk as elites and eggheads. He is the champion of making people hate each other, after all. And she is head girl of the elite.

Trump did not do well here in the primary, however, and the chair of the University of Wisconsin political science department, David Canon, expects Clinton to do “marginally better against Trump than the national result.”

South of the state capital, two native sons from the small, depressed town of Janesville, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Democrat Russ Feingold, perfectly illustrate how far apart the two parties are.

Ryan, every inch the company man whose conscience cowers at Trump, can’t keep a neat House of Representatives. He has an unruly bunch of Republicans in the majority, and Democrats are beginning to show spirit, as they did staging a House sit-in on gun violence, which made Ryan fighting mad.

As senator, Feingold was the only one to vote against the Patriot Act. Bully for him. He’s running for the seat he lost in the tea party tempest six years ago.

For many — those who see Wisconsin as an enlightened state that produced Thornton Wilder, the playwright of the classic “Our Town,” dissenters who remember the campus anti-Vietnam War movement started on the shores of Lake Mendota and intellectuals who dwell on tree-shaded streets named after universities — there is a profound gulf with the rest of the largely rural small-town fabric of the state. Green Bay, for example, could not be more different than liberal, urbane Madison and the diverse, sturdy patchwork of Milwaukee.

Wisconsin can never be taken for granted, but current waters seem especially turbulent. In her insightful new book, “The Politics of Resentment,” Katherine J. Cramer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, interviews working-class people from the rural reaches of Wisconsin. She struck up conversations with some people at gas stations. She explains clearly how forgotten and ignored they generally feel, caught in an economic cauldron with hourly wage work or health care costs that make life harder to get by since the Great Recession hit eight years ago.

The economic downturn that President Obama inherited from the “war president” George W. Bush has left fingerprints on so many houses and families. As Cramer shows, people are still struggling and they resent others with more privilege and access to new rules in an ethereal economy. The Obama “recovery” has Wisconsinites asking, “what recovery?” When Trump speaks of free trade and lost jobs, he strikes a chord.

Like the Mississippi River that runs along its border, Wisconsin captures the cross-currents of the national stage better than anywhere. With hard-charging right-wing Gov. Scott Walker set to speak at the Republican National Convention, the state’s civil war will be on display. Walker is hostile to a pride and joy, the University of Wisconsin, bleeding under budget cuts, and to public employee unions.

The Progressive Party was founded here, about 100 years ago, to stand for fairness and squareness in the Midwestern tradition, especially toward the giant monopolies like Standard Oil. Collective bargaining was practically invented here. Senator John F. Kennedy served on a committee that chose Robert La Follette, a Progressive, as one of the greatest in Senate history.

But never forget that Communist witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy, the senator who first exploited the anti-intellectual, paranoid and nativist steaks in American politics, also started here.

A remnant of the real Civil War hangs around Madison’s heart. It’s a comfort that famed Camp Randall, the UW football stadium, began as a place on the right side of the Civil War. Here Confederate war prisoners learned the Union was not for quitting.

Somehow that makes things better.

Photo: Unions workers (front) and various supporters hold up signs before a U.S. Democratic presidential candidates debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States February 11, 2016. REUTERS/Darren Hauck

Poll: Dems Have Chance To Keep Senate By Focusing On Economy, Women

Poll: Dems Have Chance To Keep Senate By Focusing On Economy, Women

A new survey of likely voters in the 12 states where control of the Senate is being contested shows that the race between Democrats and Republicans is very close, but Democrats could pull ahead by conveying a populist economic message and attacking Republicans on women’s issues.

The poll, which was conducted by Democracy Corps and the Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, shows Republican candidates with a 46 to 44 percent lead over Democratic candidates in these states, which Mitt Romney collectively won by 9 percent in 2012.

The poll finds that unmarried women are the “most important target” for Democrats. When these voters are shown the economic messages from both parties, their support for Democrats shifts from +11 to +20. The Democratic message advocates for raising the minimum wage, ensuring that women are paid equally, and providing support for working mothers, while the Republican message attacks Obamacare and big government, and accuses President Obama of failing on the economy. Attacks on Republicans are far more successful with this demographic than attacks on Democrats.

Democrats have the disadvantage of the president’s lowly 37 percent favorability rating, but Republicans are also extremely unpopular. The poll finds that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH)’s agenda not only hurts House Republicans, but Senate Republicans as well.

Meanwhile, the Democratic incumbents in these states have higher favorability ratings than President Obama, and they are better liked than their Republican opponents.

The poll also found that voters are split on whether or not it matters that Republican candidates support the Hobby Lobby decision. But it’s still a very powerful issue for women.

Voters are also split on the Affordable Care Act, though those who want it repealed feel more strongly than those who support the law.

And a debate over campaign spending and big money increases Democratic support.

In a press call, Democracy Corps’ Stan Greenberg said that support for Democrats among women is way lower than it was in 2012 because of the struggling economy and the lack of action in Congress.

“[It’s] their perception of total gridlock in Washington,” he explained.

Greenberg also thinks that Democrats haven’t successfully pushed a populist economic message, as they have mostly tried to appeal to women through issues such as access to abortion. But if they focus on both equal pay and women’s health before November, he believes they’ll have a better chance of keeping the Senate.

“Democrats have not been speaking to them,” he said. “[The] president’s economic message has been benign.”

Page Gardner, the president of Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, agreed. She thinks there will be a “shift” in voter participation “once there are messages that are aimed at [women’s] lives.”

Once unmarried women become more invested in the midterms, she thinks they’ll have a huge impact on the results.

“In the 12 battleground states where we conducted today’s poll with Democracy Corps, it’s increasingly clear that Senate candidates can’t win without the votes of unmarried women,” Gardner wrote in a statement. “Unmarried women favor Democrats in the battlegrounds by 50 to 39, a sizable difference. Unmarried women are poised to make the difference this election year.”

Photo: Crazy George via Flickr

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