So what?
G. Elliott Morris analyzed that awful Wall St Journal poll that showed the Democrats are more unpopular than dirt but sees something that may surprise you:
The WSJ reports that Democrats are 19 points underwater in party image compared to Republicans. That’s indeed pretty bad. But does it mean, e.g., that voters won’t vote for Democrats in next year’s elections? In fact, no! The very same Wall Street Journal poll that got branded as the party having its “worst ever” image also shows the Democrats up three in the generic congressional ballot. That’s a six-point swing from their last poll in 2024 and would be large enough for the Democrats to win somewhere around 230-235 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
But how can the Democrats have such a poor rating while winning the House popular vote? What’s going on here is that a lot of Democratic voters don’t like the party brand, but still think of themselves as Democratic voters, and will vote for the party above alternatives.
And Democrats loathe The GOP.
This is also relevant:
There’s a related point to make here, and that’s that polling data this early in the cycle has almost no predictive power for congressional election outcomes. I’m going to boot up the historical data now, and run some predictive models to show you just how poorly these early polls predict congressional — and especially midterm — elections. In particular for midterms, the relationship is so weak that you’re actually better betting against the party that has the favorability rating advantage this early in the cycle, historically speaking.
In fact:
There’s a lot more in the post and if you are interested in polling and data analysis, his Substack is well worth a subscription.
I’m not panicking about the Democratic Party favorability. How could it be anything else after seven long months of self-flagellation and endless navel gazing about what went wrong last November? (This is somewhat understandable since it’s unfathomable that the country would return that orange miscreant to the White House.) But Morris’s data should give us at least some hope that we haven’t talked ourselves into a crushing defeat in 206. It’s highly unlikely with Trump’s approval in the high 30s to low 40s and sinking like a stone.
I’m not making any predictions but I’m not feeling hopeless. Yet.