Generally, when Democrats get bad poll numbers – especially on a consistent basis – their cheerleaders in the mainstream press do one of two things: try to make things appear rosier than they are by doing “silver lining” reports, or sound alarm bells in an effort to warn their fellow Democrats of what’s ahead come election time if they don’t get it together.
NBC News “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd, a media apologist for the left if there ever was one, did the alarm bells thing in a report he filed during his Sunday program, pointing to the most recent polling numbers from his network but diving further into them to show from a historical context just how bad things were for Democrats courtesy of one man: Joe Biden.
Todd focused on three key areas he said were indicative of how a president’s political party typically fared during midterms: Approval ratings for the president, where people were on the direction they felt the country was headed, and party control of Congress. In two of these three, Todd noted that the numbers were in “shellacking” territory for Democrats come November:
“I’m going to start with perhaps the most important number to understand the direction of the midterms, its job approval here, the president’s job approval rating sitting at 43%. If you look at history, history shows that kind of presidential approval rating leads to a shellacking for the party in power. How about the mood of the nation? Let me show you this, right now our wrong track, nations on the wrong track number sitting at 72% – second poll in a row where we’ve been over 70%. This is only the third time in our poll’s history over thirty years where we’ve had two tracks that off. That again would put you in shellacking territory for the party in power.”
“The one place Democrats are holding up okay is on the question of which party should control congress: basically a dead heat, one point advantage there, but most analysts will tell you Democrats have to be up by about four or five due to redistricting in order to actually hold the house here so that puts it in the middle. But as you can see, two of our three most important indexes is sitting in shellacking territory right now for the Democrats. This is a dangerous place for the party and the president to be at the one-year mark of this presidency.”
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Indeed, and as our own Nick Arama reported, perhaps most alarming for Democrats is the fact that independents have also soured on Biden a great deal over his time in office so far, with some suggesting during interviews that Biden has gone too far to the left, while others say he hasn’t been the uniter he said he would be.
This dovetails with how we saw independents vote in the 2021 Virginia elections, with polling and interviews going into Election Day as well as exit polling showing independents were turning away from Biden and Democrats on educational matters and also because they believed he was shifting too far leftward, deciding to vote for Republicans in order to send a message.
There’s still a lot of time between now and November, but Democrats have this penchant for doubling down when they’re up against the ropes, and I don’t see that changing here. The economy is ultimately where it’s at, and if a majority of voters are still sitting around their kitchen tables trying to figure out how to make ends meet when the time to cast their votes comes, that “shellacking” Chuck Todd warned about will become a very painful reality for Biden and his fellow Democrats as people decide “enough is enough.”