OPINION:
We are about three months from the start of this year’s general election (early voting starts Sept. 18 in Minnesota and South Dakota), and it is probably a bit too early to make any informed predictions. It is not, however, too early to point out a few trends that give us a sense of the race.
One of the most important metrics in an election cycle is the generic congressional ballot question: “Which party’s candidate(s) are you going to vote for in November?” Responses to that question, as curated by RealClearPolitics, have been tilting in favor of the Democrats by about 5 percentage points on average over the past seven months.
That stasis suggests that, despite the inexcusably destructive and ultimately pointless gerrymandering on both sides, and the Supreme Court’s tardiness in ruling on the legitimacy of the Voting Rights Act, the likely range of outcomes in November is probably what it has been since the beginning of the year: plus six or eight seats for Republicans, plus 10 or 12 seats for Democrats.
We are in the sixth year of a now-unpopular president’s term of office, and the price of gas remains high amid a conflict that was chosen at an inopportune moment (at least with respect to the American political calendar).
The Democrats’ inability to put any more distance between themselves and a Republican Party that has not had a good 2026 is a testament to the Democrats’ dysfunction and indicates that a blue wave probably will not emerge in November.
Voters’ hesitation to fully embrace a potential Democratic majority, at least in the House, is, in large measure, because of the Democrats’ inability to recruit, nominate and run normal candidates. This is not a new feature of the landscape.
Think about the 2024 presidential election. Some voters may not have liked President Trump, but they could not in good conscience cast their ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris.
That same calculation is no doubt again being made in households across the nation, as voters try to assess whether they can vote for candidates who have Nazi tattoos on their chests, who pal around with people who excuse and rationalize murder and theft, or who mainly seem to want to fight the oligarchy, whatever that might be, rather than enact positive policies for Americans.
A more normal set of candidates would have had this campaign cycle wrapped up by now.
If the Democrats had discovered or could discover three dozen or so candidates closer to the baselines of average Americans, they would run the table. Yet they cannot, so they will not.
The party is irreducibly dominated by its cohort of White, college-educated, liberal enforcers who lean way out to the left on every conceivable issue.
There are also campaign mechanics that retard and complicate the Democrats’ ability to generate a blue wave. The Republicans recently put out a pretty interesting memo on voter registration in 28 battleground districts.
In those districts, Democrats have lost more than 275,000 registered voters in the last 18 months. Republicans have lost about 50,000 voters in those same districts.
The numbers are worse when you pan back and compare them with 2020. After the 2020 election, Democrats had a 733,000 voter registration advantage in those 28 districts. Now, Republicans have a modest 4,100 voter registration advantage in the districts.
This bleeding has occurred within a larger context: Since 2021, the number of registered Democrats has declined by 2.1 million across the 30 states that track voter registration, while Republicans have increased by 2.4 million.
Despite all this, it is more likely than not that the Democrats will have narrow control of the House in January. Nature and the American electorate usually find a way to balance things.
Yet that majority will be much more attenuated than it would be if the party were running candidates less interested in climate change, transgenderism, punishing billionaires through wealth taxes, stacking the Supreme Court and “fighting” the Trump administration.
They would have had far better luck had they been more interested in expanding the economy, addressing illegal immigration and avoiding foreign adventurism to the maximum extent possible.
The great Ruy Teixeira once said that America has two minority parties, neither of which seems very interested in doing what it takes to become a durable national majority coalition. The Democrats seem to want to use this election to prove Mr. Teixeira’s theory.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
Follow the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.