AMAC Exclusive by Harold Boas
There are increasingly clear signals that the nascent Biden administration agenda and that of its Congressional allies includes many policies that are unpopular with voters and are unlikely to build support for Democratic candidates in competitive races in the 2022 national mid-term elections next year.
What is most curious is that these signals appear to be coming not just from Republicans (which might be expected), but also from many Democratic voters who say they are uncomfortable with packing the U.S. Supreme Court, defunding the police, throwing open the borders to mass immigration, cutting off support for Israel, and controversial new energy policies advanced by progressive leaders.
Reinforcing this has been series of polls and comments from long-time Democratic pollsters, consultants, strategists, and figures who are sounding alarms about the lurch to the left that they say are pushing many traditional Democratic voters to support GOP candidates.
Most recently, the Washington Examiner reported the polling and conclusions of veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. Greenberg’s research indicates that GOP voters are much more united behind former President Donald Trump than many have supposed (in the wake of post-election Never-Trumper declarations from figures such as Liz Cheney) and that Republican voters are noticeably more interested in the 2022 election than are Democratic voters. Greenberg concludes from his polling data that anti-Trump sentiment within the Republican Party is now primarily confined to the Beltway, while divisions among Democrats are increasingly pronounced. Greenberg suggests that this could lead to a rout of his party in next year’s elections.
Greenburg’s major finding was that “Trump’s loyalists and aligned voters are 75 percent of the GOP in the 2022 battleground and importantly, are already consolidated and engaged in support of Trump’s unfinished fight for America. The critical bloc of non-Trump conservatives and moderates is only a quarter of the battleground electorate[.]” Greenberg also found that “Trump loyalists, Republicans, and white working-class voters [are] as much more engaged than Democrats, with Trump still able to shape events. High interest is not as high as a presidential year, but it is comparable to 2018, suggesting the era of high turnout elections is not over.”
Greenberg is not alone in sounding the alarm for Democrats.
Veteran Democratic pollsters, statisticians, consultants, strategists. And partisans such as Doug Schoen, Mark Penn, David Schor, James Carville, Rahm Emmanuel, and even Michael Moore have in recent months and years expressed their concern about the direction their party is taking—including raising the prospect that Democrats’ far-left policy positions are turning away the party’s traditional Hispanic, Jewish, black, and white working-class voters.
Ironically, the impetus for this left turn in Democratic Party politics is coming from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, urban activists, and the four congressional “Sirens” of the Squad (who like the temptresses of mythology, lure their victims to disaster). This was the same group that Democratic voters rejected in the 2020 presidential nomination contest in favor of “moderate” Joe Biden. But now, they seem to be dictating administration policy on everything from energy to immigration to education.
Democrats have gone down this perilous road before, even in the recent past. Immediately after President Obama’s election in 2009-10, the party put forward unpopular programs, most notably in healthcare. They suffered devastating losses in the 2010 mid-term elections as a result, and Obama left office with the Republican Party at its strongest in decades.
The question is, how accurate are the Democrat polls showing that the party may be in trouble?
In 2016 and 2020, most Democratic and media polls were not accurate in the presidential race, and many U.S. House and Senate races also under-measured Republican support. Greenberg and some other liberal pollsters are apparently trying to learn from those experiences. After all, their polling is meant primarily for their individual Democratic clients, and often the results are not publicly published. The fact that Greenberg and others are going public now indicates their alarm about 2022 and beyond. And if pollsters have not solved their systemic errors from 2020 and 2016, it may be that the polls that are causing them such concern even underestimate the threat to Democrat control in Washington.
So far, “moderate” Joe Biden and “savvy” Speaker Nancy Pelosi don’t seem to be listening to them.