After Democrat Doug Jones (D-AL) overtook Judge Roy Moore, the Republican candidate in last year’s special election for an Alabama Senate seat, predictions of an impending wave of Democrat 2018 victories were many.
Those predictions are looking less ironclad now.
According to the Washington Post, President Trump offered some remarks to that effect congressional Republicans last week during the course of their customary policy retreat: “‘You folks have done well,’ Trump told them Thursday, referring to ‘some numbers’ he’d just seen. ‘You’ve even done better than you thought, I think, based on what we just saw about 10 minutes ago.'”
“The ‘numbers’ Trump referred to was a new batch of national polling from Monmouth University that showed only a narrow, two-point edge for Democrats in the generic congressional ballot, said Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), the current NRCC chairman who said he showed Trump the figures before the speech. It also showed an uptick in Trump’s popularity, although it still remains historically low.”
(Monmouth’s poll results can be viewed in full here: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/MonmouthPoll_US_013118/.)
And Trump’s presidential approval rating is indeed swinging higher, a fact he noted over the weekend:
Rasmussen just announced that my approval rating jumped to 49%, a far better number than I had in winning the Election, and higher than certain “sacred cows.” Other Trump polls are way up also. So why does the media refuse to write this? Oh well, someday!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2018
On the other hand, RealClearPolitics’ polling average for this November’s midterm elections has Democrats ahead of Republicans by 6.6 percentage points.
But the elections are 10 months away, which should be plenty of time for Republicans to get out in front of the narrative and make their case for their agenda to Americans.
For instance, the same Monmouth poll found that approval for the new tax law skyrocketed from 26% to 44% . . . probably about the same time Americans found out that, contrary to Democrats’ hysteria, lowering taxes would benefit the majority of them (and will probably not result in “armageddon“).
