Election Insiders: Tuesday’s Going to Be a ‘Bloodbath’ for Democrats

What’s left to be said the day before voters head to the polls in droves to decide control of Congress and several state governorships? Well, perhaps as much as polls have shown a swing toward Republicans in the last month, chances of Democrats holding on to much of anything might actually be overstated.

Campaigns on both sides are privy to a lot of information that’s never made public. They conduct their own targeted polling, they have a gauge on specific swing areas and counties, and they know the general response of voters compared to previous years. In short, the campaigns likely know, or at least have a good idea, of where they’ll end up on election night.

According to an article in The New Yorker, Republican insiders are predicting a bigger night for GOP candidates than polls would suggest, and perhaps a “bloodbath” for Democrats in areas once thought of as “safe” districts or races:

The consensus among a number of G.O.P. pollsters and operatives I spoke to this week is that in the Senate races that are thought to be competitive, Republican candidates are heading for a clean sweep: Mehmet Oz will beat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and not just by a point or two; Adam Laxalt looks pretty certain to defeat the incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada; even less regarded candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona will be carried into office by a predicted wave.

“He won’t deserve it, but I think at this point he falls into a Senate seat,” one Republican strategist told me. To these Republican insiders, certain high-profile races in which G.O.P. candidates were already favored now look like potential blowouts—Kari Lake’s campaign for governor in Arizona, J. D. Vance’s for Senate in Ohio. And some races that seemed out of reach, such as the Senate campaign, in New Hampshire, of the election denier Don Bolduc, now look like possible wins. The word that kept coming up in these conversations was “bloodbath.”

If election night does end this badly for Democrats, where does that leave them heading into 2024? The message of abortion plus hating Donald Trump will have proven a failure once again. They might have to run on the issues for once.

Speaking of the tired playbook of repeating Trump-bashing and abortion zingers, there’s a reason why the larger electorate as a whole isn’t responding even though Democrats keep selling it:

This Republican said that he and a colleague had examined polls in which they had access to individual voter data and concluded that as much as sixty per cent of Democratic poll respondents this summer were so-called super voters, those who vote in every single election, even though such voters normally compose about a third of the general electorate in each party. (He found no such effect among Republicans.) “This created an informational doom loop, where Democratic candidates get told, You should talk about January 6th, democracy being on the ballot, trans rights,’ ” he said, “because their primary super voters are picking up the phone and telling them this is what they care about.”

Democrats are preaching to their own choir on abortion and the January 6 investigations. The people motivated by both issues were already planning to vote for Democrats anyway, they didn’t need much prompting. For the wider voting base, the repeated Democratic talking points have become proof that the party as a whole has basically checked itself out of the conversation on inflation and the economy, not to mention pressing issues like violent crime and immigration.

In other words, if your top issue is abortion, you were already voting Democrat and no amount of persuading is going to turn independents or moderates on that single issue alone.

Another theme from the campaign insiders interviewed by the New Yorker is a case of simple polling error and shortcomings:

When it comes to polling, these shifts have created an imbalance, in which one of the most visible groups in politics, and one especially energized by the Dobbs decision, had shifted toward Democrats, and one of the least visible had shifted toward Republicans. “The fastest-moving portion of the electorate is Hispanic men, and the second-fastest-moving portion of the electorate is Black men,” the Republican consultant told me. You want to get them on the phone? “Good f*cking luck.”

This is why Robert Cahaly, founder of the Trafalgar Group, casts a wider net to get responses from text messages and emails in addition to phone calls. So many people ignore unknown spam phone calls nowadays to cell phones and simply don’t have time to spend 20 or 30 minutes taking a poll. They’ll vote, sure, but they aren’t going to sit through questions about their favorability views on a dozen different politicians just to get to a question about which candidate they support.

If Democrats end up on Wednesday as the new minority party and Republicans actually do pick up 4 or 5 seats in the Senate, what’s left for the “election denier” narrative that says Trump-endorsed candidates are too extreme to win statewide? Maybe Democrats have the problem with “candidate quality,” not the GOP. That’s not to mention the fact that Democratic groups spent tens of millions of dollars propping up candidates like “election denier” Don Bolduc in New Hampshire with the hope that they could promote the most unelectable option, only to now be fretting that they might actually win in the end. In essence, they may have beaten themselves at their own game.

The end result on Tuesday night could be worse for Democrats than expected but not quite as awful as the New Yorker article insiders would predict. We’ll know soon enough as poll results will start popping up in less than 24 hours from now.