Speaker 1: There's been a dramatic turn of events in 2022, polling over the last couple of months.
And I don't want to overstate this, but I also don't want to ignore the story because when three,
four months ago, I was saying, guys, listen, everyone must vote and we have to do everything,
fight for every seat, all of these things. But it's not looking great for Democrats in 2022. I
think Democrats will lose the House. I think Democrats will lose the Senate. Some of you
wrote to me and said, David, why are you writing it off? You should just say we can win it. Well,
I'm not writing it off. I'm just telling you what the polling is and I'm being realistic. The
polling has reversed, reversed dramatically. And Democrats are now ahead of Republicans
in three recent polls looking at a generic 2022 ballot. A generic 2022 ballot means regardless of
where you are, you plan to vote for the Democrat or for the Republican. This is not normal. And
again, now there's the risk of another unintended consequence of mentioning this, which is if I say,
oh, Democrats are doing great now, then people will say, Well, I don't need to vote. I don't
quite frankly think this show is big enough to have that much of an effect one way or the other.
But we all must vote. But we should understand the numbers. Three new polls in a new Marist poll in a
congressional ballot. Democrats, 48, Republicans, 41. That's a plus seven. For Democrats, that's a
big, big deal. In a new Politico morning consult poll, Democrats 45. Republicans 42. That's plus
three for Democrats. And then in a new Yahoo News YouGov poll, Democrats, 45. Republicans,
38. That's plus seven for Democrats. Why are these numbers such a big deal? There's two reasons.
Number one, this is not typically what you see when one party has taken the White House in the
previous election, in 2020, Democrats took the White House from Republicans. Biden beat Trump.
You all know that. And typically, almost always with like three exceptions. When that happens,
you would expect Republicans to do really well in the first midterms, which would be four and a half
months from now in November. So, number one, the fact that the numbers differ from that traditional
historical reality is a really big deal. But the second reason that it's a really big deal is this
is not the way the numbers look just three months ago. And I think that we can all sort of take a
cynical approach here and say this is temporary. It'll go back to Republicans crushing Democrats by
November. Well, it's not obvious to me, but one of the things we've been talking about now for about
two months is, are there unique circumstances in this election that make it potentially okay for
Democrats when Republicans should be winning? And I say that the answer is yes. This is not a
guarantee of anything. I'm still getting a lot of people on Twitter saying, David, you loser.
Some of them say worse things than that. Republicans are going to crush Democrats in
November. Just wait and see. Well, maybe, but there are some different circumstances here.
First of all, normally when we say, oh, Democrats can win by running on abortion rights, know that
historically that's not a good issue for Democrats to run on. It's not a winning issue. It's not a
voting issue for Democrats. It's the type of issue that will motivate Republicans to come out to vote
against a pro-choice candidate. Typically, that's the way it is this time around, it looks like it
could be different. Americans are more in favor of abortion being legal in most cases than at any
time over the last 50 years. So public opinion is different now than it has been on abortion. And in
addition to that, Republican appointed Republican nominee Trump nominated Supreme Court justices
have overturn Roe v Wade, something which two thirds of Americans are in disagreement with. That
is different. And that means in this election, that situation could make it better for Democrats,
particularly if they say we're the ones trying to keep these rights, whether it's credible or not,
that that's what Democrats are going to do. Secondly, normally running on gun safety
regulation is a losing issue for Democrats. We've talked about it before. We've talked
about it with a number of political strategists. When Democrats make gun safety regulations a big
part of their campaign, it doesn't really motivate Democrats to come out and vote for them,
but it does motivate Republicans to come out and vote against them. However, the rash of school
and other mass shootings in the United States over the last three months and just tragic numbers,
hundreds of mass shootings in the United States in 2022 so far seem to have tired out and exhausted
many Americans about the Republican Party's unwillingness to consider serious gun safety
regulations. And so you have a situation where in this particular midterm, it might actually
work for Democrats to run on gun safety and on abortion rights. So that's. The normal.
The other element that is different than normal in these midterms is that we are coming up against
the tail end of this six year Trumpian cycle. And I'll explain to you what I mean by that.
Normally, you have a sort of relatively similar electorate throughout three elections. So like if
you look at, I don't know, 2000, 2002 and 2004, as an example, the electorate George W Bush won
the presidency in 2000. And then you had the 2002 midterms. And Bush won reelection in 2004.
There was no major change to the electorate in the year 2000, which then had to sort of sort itself
out in 2000, two. And in 2004, it was a very similar electorate. Okay. That is not the case
right now. In 2016, you had all of these formerly nonpolitical, nonvoting people who were enamored
with Trump, a lot of low information voters, a lot of extremists of different kinds, people who were
clueless. All these people were not participating in politics before 2016. They appeared in 2016.
And then in 2018, some of them voted in the midterms. And then in 2020, they were still around
and trying to get Trump reelected and now Trump's gone. And there's a real question as to do these
Trumps vote in midterms where now Trump isn't even a candidate and Trump is less visible and so many
other things are going on? Or do those people that only entered the political space thanks to Trump's
presence, do they just kind of go back to whatever they were doing before? I don't know what that is,
but it didn't include voting. We don't know the answer to that. But it's potentially something
that will really change the makeup of the 2022 midterm electorate. So do I have a definitive
answer? I don't. But when we see Republicans were winning every generic ballot three months ago,
Democrats are now winning every generic ballot. That is a major change and
potentially significant. So I'm not ready to count out Democrats in 2022, but we must vote.
We must get involved in campaigns, phone banking, all of it. And we'll be doing
everything we can to cover these, to cover the important races and the mid-terms at large.