Democrats overperform again
Politico reported this morning:
If last night’s election returns were going to provide any surprises, they weren’t supposed to come out of Ohio’s 6th Congressional District.
In a special election race that got basically zero national attention, Republican state Sen. MICHAEL RULLI was thought certain to rout Democrat MICHAEL KRIPCHAK, a former Air Force officer and once-aspiring actor who quit a Youngstown-area restaurant job to run for Congress.
DONALD TRUMP, after all, had won the blue-collar, mostly rural district previously represented by GOP Rep. BILL JOHNSON by 29 points in 2022. Furthermore, Rulli raised nearly 30 times more than Kripchak’s shoestring budget.
Rulli, in the end, managed only a not-quite-10-point victory over Kripchak — a roughly 20-point swing toward Democrats versus Trump’s 2020 showing. More from AP
With early returns putting the race even closer, our minds immediately turned to SIMON ROSENBERG, the Democratic high priest of hopium, who has counseled anxious Democrats for going on three years now to pay less attention to polls and more attention to how voters actually vote. It paid off big time in 2022, when he was one of the few pundits to predict a GOP midterm fizzle.
We figured this relative Republican bust couldn’t come at a more opportune time for the nervous nellies of the left, who have watched President JOE BIDEN’s poll numbers stagnate for months despite effort after effort to turn things around. So we called Rosenberg up, and he did not disappoint.
“There has been a fairly consistent pattern where Democrats have overperformed expectations, overperformed public polling,” he said. “The single most powerful force in our politics is fear and opposition to MAGA. When the choice of MAGA and other alternatives are presented to voters, MAGA underperforms public polling.”
CNN discussed this today and pooh-poohed it as having any meaning at all. They were especially dismissive of Rosenberg as some kind of left wing crank even as they admitted that he’s been right for several cycles and that Democrats have been over performing since 2020. The consensus is that Trump is a juggernaut when it comes to turnout so he’ll be bringing out hordes of new voters in November. I got the impression that they all think it’s pretty silly to think that the Democrats might be motivated to vote.
I wouldn’t care too much about this (since it’s been their posture since Trump won in 2016 and it hasn’t stopped the Democrats from winning) if it weren’t for the fact that this narrative validates Trump’s insistence that the Biden can’t possibly win unless he steals it. They are helping him set the stage for another pass at declaring the election is rigged by presenting a very tight race as if Trump is dominating. It’s dangerous. And it’s just not factual.