Is this just a blip during a particularly bad news cycle? Maybe.
It is early to predict the political fallout from the fall of Afghanistan, or to project the 2022 midterm elections. It is even still a little early to draw hard conclusions about what will happen in the California recall in September or the Virginia elections for governor and House of Delegates in November. But we can say this much: There are warning lights flashing for Democrats.
Warning light No. 1: Joe Biden’s plunging approval rating in national polls. In the RealClearPolitics average, Biden was in double-digit positive territory into late June, and just shy of that less than a month ago. He went underwater, with more voters disapproving than approving, for the first time on Saturday, and as of this writing, has rebounded just slightly to 48.3% approval and 47.3% disapproval. The honeymoon period is over; Biden will now have to fight to recover or at least stave off further deterioration.
Warning light No. 2: Biden’s state-level approval. After all, while we quote national numbers all the time for a variety of purposes, in the real world there is no such thing as a national popular-vote election, especially for Congress. Most pollsters at this point are just running national polls because they are cheaper to produce.
One pollster running regular breakouts of its numbers by state is the online pollster Civiqs. Standard cautions apply about relying on a single pollster, and Civiqs is not one of the most reliable pollsters out there; Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives it a B-minus grade. But that is mainly because Civiqs, which was founded by Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos, had nearly a 3-point bias toward Democrats in 2020. Of the 22 polls it published in October 2020, 20 reported results more favorable to Democrats than the final result, including calling Biden the winner of Florida, North Carolina, and Iowa.
If you look at where Biden stands today in the state-by-state polling on the Civiqs website, it is . . . not pretty:
Civiqs has Biden’s approval rating underwater in eleven states that he carried in 2020, plus he is only at +2 in Washington state and +1 in his home state of Delaware, where he was underwater two days ago. He’s below 50 percent approval in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon, and Connecticut. His overall national approval is 42 percent approve/50 percent disapprove, which concededly is rather worse than the RCP average result, but what the state-by-state results here show is that his national numbers are artificially dependent upon being up 14 points in California, 11 in New York, 19 in Massachusetts, and 17 in Maryland. The picture on the ground in competitive states is a lot worse:
The “weighted” column at the bottom weights the states by their size in the Electoral College. Across the weighted average of these states, Biden is 11 points underwater. Biden has lost a little ground in New Hampshire, by this measure, and a lot of ground in just about every other competitive state. Democrats may not be particularly worried about Texas and Iowa, but this much regression in states that Biden carried narrowly (Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) is a real problem. One new poll in Michigan, for example, has Gretchen Whitmer up by just a point to an almost completely unknown opponent. And to see Biden polling so poorly in a Democrat-friendly poll in Virginia, Colorado, and New Mexico is really alarming for Democrats.
Warning light No. 3: actual election results. Harry Enten at CNN has run the numbers, and they tell a similar story:
Across more than 30 special state legislative and federal elections during the Biden presidency, Republicans are doing 4 points better on average than former President Donald Trump did in these same districts last year… this would likely be enough for Republicans to take back the US House of Representatives, especially considering that they are in a good position for redistricting.
What really jumps out, though, is the trend. When you look at the first 17 special elections this year (through early April), the Republican overperformance over Trump was just a point. Examining the last 17 special elections, the overperformance has been 7 points. When you splice the data even further, Republicans have been outperforming the 2020 baseline by double-digits since the beginning of July… The shift in favor of Republicans in special election results comes as other indicators suggest that the environment is getting better for the GOP. The Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot is down to an average 2 points over the last month, after being 4 points for much of the year.
Is this just a blip during a particularly bad news cycle? Maybe. We might get some idea this fall. A Republican victory in either or both of the California recall and the Virginia governor’s race is still an uphill climb, but Democrats losing either of them would be a major political event; losing both, an earthquake. But GOP hopes of reclaiming the House and/or the Senate do not depend on what happens in either race. Either way, things are looking up, for now, for Republicans, and down for Democrats.