By Dave Andrusko
Every once in a while it’s nice to be able to publish unabashedly good news, even better if we can publish two such stories.
Earlier today, I ran my daily update on the election contest between former President Donald Trump and pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris: “42 days until the November 5 elections. What’s new and what might that tell us?” What it told us was Democrats are plenty nervous.
The second item is from Gallup. Written by Jeffery M. Jones, the headline was music to our ears: “2024 Election Environment Favorable to GOP: Party affiliation, GOP issue advantages, economic pessimism among key factors.”
The headline does not exaggerate. Here’s the first paragraph of Jones’s story:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Nearly all Gallup measures that have shown some relationship to past presidential election outcomes or that speak to current perceptions of the two major parties favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party. Chief among these are Republican advantages in U.S. adults’ party identification and leanings, the belief that the GOP rather than the Democratic Party is better able to handle the most important problem facing the country, Americans’ dissatisfaction with the state of the nation, and negative evaluations of the economy with a Democratic administration in office.
I’d like to dig in on them all, but in the interest of brevity, I’ll just go through three and choose just the highlights. I’ll also will write briefly about Jones’s “bottom line.”
First, Party Identification and Leaning.
More U.S. adults identify as Republican or say they lean toward the Republican Party (48%) than identify as or lean Democratic (45%). …
Party affiliation and voting are strongly predictive of individuals’ vote choices, with the vast majority of identifiers and leaners voting for the candidate of their preferred party. …
Republicans previously have not had an outright advantage in party affiliation during the third quarter of a presidential election year, and they have rarely outnumbered Democrats in election and nonelection years over the past three decades.
Second, Party Performance on Issues
Three separate measures of party performance on issues favor the Republican Party by at least a modest margin. …
By 46% to 41%, Americans say the Republican Party is better able than the Democratic Party to address what they think is the most important problem facing the country. The top issues Americans currently name as the most important are ones that tend to favor the GOP, including the economy (24%), immigration (22%), the government (17%) and inflation (15%).
This measure has been highly predictive of election outcomes in Gallup trends dating back to 1948. …
Republicans hold a more substantial advantage of 14 points (54% to 40%) as the party Americans believe is better able to keep the nation safe from terrorism and other international threats. Republicans have led on this question all years it has been asked (dating back to 2002) except 2007 and 2012.
Third, National Satisfaction
Twenty-two percent of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time. Satisfaction levels this low have been associated with incumbent presidents losing their reelection bids in 1980 (19%), 1992 (22%) and 2020 (28%).
Bottom line
The political environment suggests the election is Trump’s and Republicans’ to lose. Nearly every indicator of the election context is favorable to the Republican Party, and those that aren’t are essentially tied rather than showing a Democratic advantage. Nevertheless, the two major party presidential candidates have similar favorable ratings in Gallup’s September poll, echoing presidential preference polls that suggest a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Harris.
HotAir’s David Strom concludes
He [Trump] may not look as good as we would like in the polls, but he is actually polling better against his Democrat opponent this year than in the last two elections. Harris is underpolling Biden by a lot. That’s a bad sign for her.