Look, legislative ineptitude is a bipartisan problem.
That is, the blame for gridlock inside the Beltway does not fall solely on the shoulders of the GOP. That said, when you control the government and cannot get anything done, your party will invariably lose public support.
When you exacerbate the situation by allowing the party to morph into a personality cult (which is what’s happened to the GOP under Trump), the backlash from the electorate is likely to be all the more acute, especially when the personality in question is as controversial as Trump is.
Mitch McConnell and other mainstream Republicans have recently moved to counter the influence of the Steve Bannon drift ahead of 2018 when the Breitbart boss has promised to challenge incumbents by fielding populist/nationalist candidates like Roy Moore. Of course Bannon’s “war” against the establishment risks further alienating voters as those candidates are inherently volatile. The risk for the party is that the electorate comes to identify the GOP as the party of firebrand bigots like Bannon, Trump, and Moore leading directly to devastating losses like those which played out in Virginia and Alabama.
Well in the latest evidence to suggest that the public is turning against the GOP, a new NBC/WSJ poll shows that “Democrats now enjoy their largest advantage in congressional preference in nine years.”
Specifically, 50% of registered voters polled said they would prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress vs 39% who want Republicans in charge. As NBC notes, “the last time Democrats held both a double-digit lead in the polling series and hit 50% on the congressional preference question was in September 2008, right before the party won the White House and picked up a substantial number of House and Senate seats.”
The breakdown is a disaster for Republicans. Have a look at this:
The bottom line, as spelled out buy pollster Fred Yang of Hart Research Associates, is this:
All in all, I think a 41 percent Trump approval and an +11D lead in the control of Congress definitely puts control of the Senate and the House as more doable for Democrats in 2018.
If Steve Bannon persists in trying to undermine the mainstream candidates, you can bet Democrats’ prospects will only brighten in the weeks and months ahead.
For a deeper analysis of this, head over to 538 and check out Entgen’s take on all this.
We shouldn’t conflate a national poll, the Electoral College (only for Presidential elections) and Congressional District elections. We can’t derive any information about Congressional Districts from a national polling – unless it specifically sorts results by Congressional Districts – which info in the article refd. did not show. However, we can make trend inferences based on current events like: “Bannon, Trump, and Moore leading directly to devastating losses (R) like those which played out in Virginia and Alabama.” That said its a long three years and a lot of Russian troll farm social media propaganda until Trump comes up on the average voters radar screen again.
Generally and historically, the Electoral College (EC) has only become a factor when there is less than a 3% difference between the popular vote and the Electoral College. The four elections historically decided by the Electoral College – exhibit this:
– Hayes – 1876 lost the pop. vote by 3%,
– Harrison – 1888 by 0.8%,
– G.W. Bush 2000 by 0.5%, and
– most recently by Trump – 2016 by 2.1%.
There are additional general observations that might be made regarding the Presidents that the E.C. decisions have produced:
1. They were all Republicans.
2. Trump illustrates the continuing Republican need for the EC.
3. The Presidents that E.C. seated in the White House have historically been judged to be at best average (Hayes) or poorer (Bush – worst until Trump) to the overall of 45 Presidents. Harrison generally is not ranked because he died of pneumonia after only 31 days in office.
4. Each Electoral College decided President appears to have had a successively lower popularity when he left office (we can only use Trump’s current 31-36% approval rating and the lowest in the history of US Presidents 1st year in office) as to what it might be when he leaves office.