Dobbs and the Dems’ Midterm Future
Hello Hackaroos!
Well, we continue to see the impact of the Dobbs decision on some recent special elections, but what will Joe Biden’s potential comeback mean come November for the Dems? We start there before turning to Trump’s many legal woes (we’re having a lot of trouble keeping track) and then a few election tidbits.
Thanks to everyone for continuing to subscribe to the newsletter and don’t forget to share with your friends. If they don’t like it, just plead the Fifth: https://hacksontap.bulletin.com/subscribe!
Let’s begin!
Republicans May Sob, Sob, Sob over Dobbs, Dobbs, Dobbs
GIBBS: So, we touched on it our newsletter earlier this week, but it bears repeating (even with our fancy new cutting-edge graphic below), but for the first time since mid-November 2021, the generic congressional ballot is tied. And if you listened to the podcast this week, Whit Ayres, the vaunted Republican pollster, basically said you can credit the Supreme Court's decision in the Dobbs case for that. Next, look at what happened in the special election in Nebraska’s 1st District last month and in the special election in Minnesota’s 1st district this week plus the big vote in Kansas and you can see that the overall political environment is showing some signs of shifting more positively for Democrats. In those two special elections, Democrats aren't winning, but they're overperforming compared to 2020. In Nebraska, the GOP won by six points in a district that Trump had carried by 15 in 2020. In Minnesota, the margin was four points in a district Trump won by 10. The Minnesota change was driven largely by increased suburban turnout—likely a reaction to the Supreme Court's decision. There is another special election at the end of the month in New York that may continue to offer us more clues about what’s happening out there. While you can always draw too much from special elections, they can be interesting harbingers for what's to come and are definitely worth watching since we are so close to Election Day. In other good news for Biden and Democrats, inflation may have peaked last month and gas prices nationally are under $4 a gallon for the first time in five months. This isn’t to say every problem is fixed. Not by a long shot. Hundreds of millions are struggling with historic inflation, even if it didn’t get worse last month. But maybe, just maybe, the environment is improving some for Democrats with less than 90 days until Election Day.
MURPHY: Indeed Gibbsie. Dems are finally able to make eye contact with people again after many long months in the “we’re doomed” bunker. The polling shows an uptick for Team Donkey post-Roe and it is the long-awaited bit of hopeful news the Dems have been craving. The question is, how real is it? I buy that the R’s are stumbling a bit over their clown shoes at the moment and we’ve seen in the KS primary turnout surge and the Specials you cited that the Democrats have some new energy behind them now, but a late summer surge does not make a midterm turnaround. Party generic questions (“which party would you vote for in your local Congressional election”) can move up and down over the summer, but the real landing is in October. And the big winds – inflation, economic fear – are still working hard against Joe Biden. That said, the Dems have a spark of hope now that the tide might be turning away from an elephant stampede toward an environment they might actually be able to win some seats in, particularly in the key Senate seats. But if I were Johnny Democratic, I wouldn’t bet the farm on it yet. I would crawl out of that bunker though.
Editor's Note: With the help of Robin, our key visuals wizard here, we’ve added a new metric tracker for the rest of the election. It shows three key indicators. First, Biden’s approval rating. Second, the Generic Republican vs. Democrat Congressional vote, and finally our own special Pearl Clutching Index – based on a rigorous, on-ground-interviews with DC bartenders reflecting the Fear and Panic level of Democratic insiders about the midterms. You saw it here first and we'll keep track through the big day in November…
Now back to the conversation...
GIBBS: Yeah, and I'm totally with you. The crystal ball is cloudy. Again, I think the generic congressional ballot change shows there is increasing enthusiasm to vote among Democratic voters since the Supreme Court decision, though Republicans continue to be even more energized. But, nothing that Democrats had done had gotten voters, probably particularly younger voters who tend to drop off from Presidential to non-Presidential election years, as fired up and ready to go like the Supreme Court’s dramatic overreach (which is also helped by GOP overreach in states around abortion). Does that mean the Democrats are going to continue to control the House? No, that’s extraordinarily unlikely. Does that mean that the Republicans aren’t still in the driver's seat? No, it doesn't. It does means that the political atmosphere is definitely different than it was just a few months ago and probably a good bit different than when Virginia elected a Republican governor last year.
MURPHY: The next big moment will be mid-September when the big ad spending really starts. We’ll see how that changes the end-game.
GIBBS: Undoubtedly, we are about to see a ton of money spent on a lot of negative digital and TV ads that will tell us just how different the environment out there is and will set up the post-Labor Day sprint.
MURPHY: We talked a lot about the Senate races with our pollster pal and guest Whit “Radio Pipes” Ayres on the pod earlier this week, and my Senate Bellwethers are: Nevada (does Roe energy save embattled Cortez-Masto or does the wave do her in?), Pennsylvania (does Fetterman survive the attack onslaught that’s coming and is the GOP’s anti-Biden wave big enough to prop up even hapless Doc Oz?), NH (does Chuck Morse come to life and make this the close race it should become in a good wave year?) and Ohio (can Tim Ryan’s strategically smart and well-funded campaign beat a weak GOP candidate in a state the GOP should easily win this year?). Plus there is GA and AZ which deserve a write up of their own next week. Gibbs goes deeper on the Ohio race below.
GIBBS: Don’t forget Wisconsin where GOP incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson is very vulnerable and I’m watching North Carolina closely too.
Keeping Up With Trump’s Legal Woes…
GIBBS: Well, Murphy, quite a press conference Attorney General Merrick Garland had yesterday. Hard to remember when such a short statement packed such a powerful punch. Good for him for coming out and talking about the process that went into this decision (and the earlier attempts to get these documents back without going to get them) even as we know he can’t and won’t talk about the substance of whatever case is happening here. I have no doubt the Department of Justice employees felt under siege as did law enforcement. Plus, the reports that those documents might have contained highly secret information about nuclear weapons and you start to realize why action had to be taken. Garland called Trump’s bluff and before long we are likely to see even more of what went into this decision. The impact of yesterday can be neatly summed up in a quote buried deep in the New York Times main story on this today: “Some senior Republicans have been warned by allies of Mr. Trump not to continue to be aggressive in criticizing the Justice Department and the F.B.I. over the matter because it is possible that more damaging information related to the search will become public.” It's now suddenly hard to keep up with all of Donald Trump's legal troubles and venues. You’ve got this at Mar-a-Lago. You've got what's happening in New York with the state Attorney General around his business dealings and taxes. You've got what's happening in Fulton County, Georgia with the special grand jury. You’ve got an impaneled Grand Jury looking at January 6 in Washington. His statement with his excuses for pleading the Fifth (“When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors, and the Fake News Media, you have no choice.”) gives you a sense that he's getting cornered in a court of law and he's trying to move this to the court of public opinion. SAD!
MURPHY: I’m about to start making large bar bets that the RNC will spend more donor money this year on Trump’s legal defense bills than voter contact activities! (Don’t get me started… that particular Trump donor rip off is the worse party scandal in decades!) When I started writing this last night, I went into my wild theory that the raid was about seizing vital intelligence documents that the CIA and FBI feared would fall into the wrong foreign hands after a foreign intelligence service paid off some disgruntled Trump butler or well underpaid Mar-a-Lago hair dyeing assistant to snatch the material and hand it over. We know already that Trump was very reckless with intel as POTUS – remember the Russians in the oval office kerfuffle – so this whole revealing top secret material that could blow assets is not a new problem with the orange Kim Jong-un fanboy. But then, just moments after I send my hot copy to our ace editor Alex… the NYT broke the story that missing highly classified material – including top level stuff about our nuclear secrets – was indeed the target of the raid. So I think the political stakes for Trump have risen. It isn’t small stuff now, but NUCLEAR SECRETS. Google the Rosenbergs. So the plot thickens and the rubber-spined chorus of Trump apologists in the GOP will want to start sliding under closed doors to try and escape. Trump says he’ll release the warrants too – before AG Garland does – so stay tuned for a bit of really fun reading.
TIDBITS:
MURPHY: My pal famed Harvard historian and NatSec expert Prof. Graham Allison, has a great new essay on how the U.S. and China screwed up the Pelosi trip on both sides. For those who don’t know Allison, he recently authored a book on the U.S. and China that much of Washington, D.C. and basically anybody in Beijing with a government car and driver in China read two years ago called Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap?
It’s well worth a read, particularly if you dig applied history. (Or, look up his TED Talk where he explains his thesis.) But right now, read his National Interest piece on Pelosi’s China trip here.
GIBBS: And coming back to the home front and some big races we’re watching, Politico did an interesting story on Ohio, which basically said that since the primary, Tim Ryan has had the airwaves to himself and has made this a competitive race. The real question is what do the next five weeks look like? As we head into the last two months, what will this a race truly look like? Like we said earlier, millions of dollars in probably very negative digital and TV ads are about to be unleashed on Tim Ryan. Will he hang tough and make this a race to watch to the end or will Ohio start to look what Ohio has been the last few election cycles? Regardless, Ryan has run a remarkably good campaign thus far, putting him in a position few thought he’d be in at this point in the cycle. Going to be fun to watch!
We’ll see you next week!
Murphy and Gibbs