Something has changed over the last three weeks. Maybe it was Joe Biden’s Fourth Reich speech. Maybe it was his announcement of student loan forgiveness—which pollster Robert Cahaly found in his polling in Pennsylvania surveys, was moving voters. Maybe it’s the end of summer, which Richard Baris argues always slants polling badly in favor of the Democrats. Maybe it’s the recent GOP public relations victory involving the shipment of illegal immigrants to blue cities and Martha’s Vinyard.
Whatever it is, something has shifted. All you need to know is that the Hill is sounding the alarm, big time, about a GOP “takeover” of the House (and, most likely, the Senate). What is the Hill seeing? Is it that in the key senate races, J.D. Vance now appears up outside the margin of error in Ohio; or that Herschel Walker, in consecutive polls, is leading the Warlock in Georgia; or that Richard Baris now has Adam Laxalt up in Nevada; or that he also has Ron Johnson up in Wisconsin (a state that perennially under-polls Republicans)?
It is important to understand that Ohio was never, ever as close as pollsters maintained because of the odd labeling of “unaffiliated” voters who are—in majority numbers— Republicans by voting history. This means Ohio has, after all, unaffiliated voters allocated, based on their last 20 years of voting, a GOP voter registration advantage of 300,000.
Other states’ voter registrations, including Nevada and Arizona, have rebounded to Republicans. In Arizona, the GOP has an edge of 147,000, up from around 110,000 in 2020 and close to its all-time high. In Nevada, likewise, Republicans have steadily cut into the Democrat lead. (In his most recent polling of Nevada, Baris has found an interesting flip in which Washoe—a traditionally red county—has shifted closer to the Democrats due to younger Asian immigrants, while Clark County has gotten significantly “redder.”
In other words, with these races, the GOP would have a one-seat advantage in the Senate, whether or not Dr. Oz loses in Pennsylvania or Blake Masters evicts Mark Kelly from Arizona. If those two won, it would result in a Senate advantage of three Republican seats. But Baris thinks that many western states, including Oregon and Colorado, will be closer than is previously thought.
Then there is “Yertle,” Mitch McConnell, currently the Minority Leader in the Senate. Previously McConnell had suggested Republicans could not win. Today, however, he has changed his tune and says Republicans will win the Senate.
The retreat of the squidpickles, though, appears to be occurring across the board. While earlier in the year, many predicted “another pandemic, another lockdown” would suppress voting; I argued that the Deep State couldn’t do this twice, that people were over the China Virus, that steadily courts were ruling against the Biden Administration, and that people were increasingly suspicious of the vax itself. Now the Biden administration asserts that the pandemic is over while traipsing to court every week to defend against another mandate/vax lawsuit.
Combine that with the endless FBI raids on innocent Americans, nearly 8% inflation, mortgage rates of over 6.2%, falling estimates of national GDP growth, and yet an administration committed to tossing still more billions of dollars at Ukraine . . . Well, the reaction was inevitable. In all likelihood, after January 20, 2023, Biden (or “The Rutabaga” as I affectionately call him) will have both a hostile legislature and hostile courts, with the exception of three major states—California, New York, and Illinois—a number of hostile state governors as well. Nevada and Arizona seem poised to flip to Republicans, while Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are all in the “toss-up” category.
Smell the fear. It’s real. It’s palpable. And it is merely the harbinger of things to come for Democrats as long as the Rutabaga is (more or less) at the helm.
Larry Schweikart is the author of Dragonslayers: Six Presidents and their War with the Swamp, the co-author of A Patriot’s History of the United States with Michael Allen, and the founder of the Wild World of History curriculum website (www.wildworldofhistory.com).
