Democrats "overperformance" in off-year and special elections, is a referendum on the Biden Administration
Thank you, Chris Hayes.
https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/12/chris-hayes-democrats-overperforming-in.html
I always watch MSNBC's election coverage. They do a much better job of analysis and explaining than any of the other networks do. Their reassurances were comforting, noting that mountains of mail-in ballots were being counted with a substantial number of Democratic votes in several battleground states and to be patient, wait, and Joe Biden would eventually be known as the winner of the election. They explained exactly how the count would go in places like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, and were very confident in their predictions. And they were right.
So when Chris Hayes did some research into election results, following yet another gloriously successful night of off-year elections that defied the doom and gloom of most media pundits who more than likely knew how things would turn out but weren't willing to concede yet another cluster of referendum elections on the Biden Administration's job performance, he found some interesting data. Hayes discovered that not only have Democrats defied prior trends after a sucessful Presidential election, but in this most recent string of special elections and off-year elections, they are overperforming their baseline by 11 percentage points. That is, according to Hayes and his research, significant.
--snip--
I can't remember who it was who said it, but I remember, back during the Reagan administration, hearing a pundit or commentator say that "Public opinion shifts just don't happen, they are manufactured." Do people really shift back and forth between politicians when it comes to politics? Not really. We do seem to have a much higher percentage of Americans who are unable to understand how politics and government work, who are unable to distinguish between propaganda and truth, and who fall into a cynical and apathetic malaise of confusion because they let themselves be affected by every trendy fad or conspiracy theory that makes the rounds of social media, than we did thirty years ago. But we're talking about upwards of 150 million people who are registered and eligible to vote. The majority of those who will are generally more informed than those who don't live in the real world.
It's showing up in real election results, not polls. And there's a lot that will happen between now and the 2024 election. A legal system that has so far withstood challenges to its integrity is about to deliver some verdicts that will have an effect on how people vote, something that even the right leaning polls now are admitting will be a significant and negative effect on their favorite candidate. Bottom line, I believe that if the election were held tomorrow, Biden would win the popular vote by at least 8 million votes, would add the states of North Carolina and Ohio to his electoral total while holding every state he won in 2020, and would be re-elected along with a majority Democratic House and Senate.
