Source: Politics<\/p>\n
At the end of October, Republicans held an 11-percentage-point advantage<\/a> in voter enthusiasm. By January, that margin had ticked up to 14 points<\/a>. Now, according to the most recent NBC News poll<\/a>, it has swelled to 17 \u2014 a massive advantage that has foreshadowed devastating losses in Congress in prior years.<\/p>\n The latest poll would be bad enough for Democrats. But it\u2019s the trend line that is especially grim, seemingly impervious to a series of events \u2014 including President Joe Biden\u2019s State of the Union address and the nomination of a judge to the Supreme Court \u2014 that Democrats had predicted might improve their candidates\u2019 prospects in the fall.<\/p>\n It\u2019s beginning to look like nothing is going to bail the party out this year. The last time the enthusiasm gap was this wide<\/a>, in 2010, Democrats lost more than 60 seats in the House.<\/p>\n \u201cThings could change,\u201d said David Axelrod, previously an adviser to former President Barack Obama, in an email. \u201cBut with only a quarter of the country believing things are headed in the right direction, the president sitting at a 40 or 42 [percent] approval and inflation at a 40-year high, the atmosphere clearly is not promising for Democrats to buck historical trends.\u201d<\/p>\n Even without the enthusiasm gap \u2014 a measure of voters\u2019 level of interest in the midterm elections \u2014 Democrats would be limping toward November. They are saddled with Biden\u2019s weak job approval numbers and have fallen behind Republicans on the generic ballot<\/a> \u2014 two leading indicators of midterm performance.<\/p>\n But now they\u2019re confronting a super-charged Republican electorate, too. In the NBC poll, about two-thirds of Republicans say they have a high level of interest in the midterm elections<\/a>, compared to half of Democrats. The party\u2019s current enthusiasm deficit is a reversal from 2018<\/a>, when Democrats retook the House.<\/p>\n The NBC poll wasn\u2019t a one-off. A POLITICO\/Morning Consult poll<\/a> on Wednesday registered a double-digit spread between the share of Democrats and Republicans who are \u201cextremely enthusiastic\u201d about voting in the midterms and a smaller \u2014 but still measurable \u2014 gap when accounting for voters who say they are only \u201cvery\u201d enthusiastic.<\/p>\n This is far from an academic concern. Facing traditional midterm headwinds, many Democrats had already resigned themselves to losing the House<\/a>. And Democrats saw what a high level of enthusiasm could do<\/a> for their opposition last fall, when Republican Glenn Youngkin upset Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia\u2019s gubernatorial race and New Jersey\u2019s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, won reelection, but by a far narrower margin than expected. The party out of power \u2014 this year, the party of \u201cLet\u2019s Go, Brandon,\u201d energized by Trump\u2019s false claims that 2020 was \u201crigged\u201d \u2014 is almost always more excited to vote.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got to stop fooling ourselves here,\u201d said Julie Roginsky, a former top adviser to Murphy. \u201cIt would be a challenging environment, anyway, because the midterm election of an incumbent president whose party controls both houses always is. Layer on top of that concerns about inflation, concerns about the economy generally and concerns about what\u2019s going on in foreign policy right now, and it becomes problematic.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s little reason to think much will change. For months, Democrats pinned hopes for a turnaround to the possibility that Covid or inflation would subside, or that Democrats might energize base voters by passing even more legislation than the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill<\/a> and massive infrastructure package<\/a> already enacted. Most recently, they saw Justice Stephen Breyer\u2019s retirement announcement \u2014 and Biden\u2019s historic nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace him \u2014 as an opening to energize young voters and people of color, two core Democratic constituencies.<\/p>\n Biden told Democratic National Committee members at their meeting earlier this month that \u201cwe are in the strongest position we\u2019ve been in in months<\/a>,\u201d with the possibility they could keep the House.<\/p>\n Less than three weeks later, the numbers are bleak. In the NBC poll<\/a>, more than seven in 10 Americans say things generally in the nation are on the wrong track. Only a third of Americans approve of Biden\u2019s handling of the economy, by far the overarching concern in the midterms. Biden\u2019s approval rating, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average<\/a>, sits below 42 percent. And while two-thirds of Democrats in the spring of 2018 registered a high level of interest<\/a> in that year\u2019s midterms \u2014 presaging a successful midterm election for the Democratic Party \u2014 just 50 percent of Democrats do today<\/a>.<\/p>\n The enthusiasm gap, said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the Bernie Sanders<\/a>-aligned group Our Revolution, is a \u201cpretty significant challenge for organizers.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s, \u2018What do we tell people that will motivate them to get out and vote?\u2019 And the challenge is you\u2019ve got at the national level a lot of frustration that a lot of the promises that Biden made didn\u2019t end up becoming actual policy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible that Democrats will turn out despite their enthusiasm deficit. That happened in last year\u2019s races, including the recall election in California, when Democrats \u2014 while measurably less excited about voting than Republicans<\/a> \u2014 nevertheless trudged to the polls, persuaded that rejecting a recall of the state\u2019s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, was better than the Republican alternative.<\/p>\n Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster and president at Impact Research, the firm that was Biden\u2019s lead pollster in the 2020 election, said that in battleground districts and states \u2014 the places where control of Congress will be decided \u2014 internal Democratic polling suggests there is not a significant enthusiasm gap. And in states like Wisconsin and Georgia, where Democrats are running in competitive elections against incumbent Republicans, there is some optimism among Democrats that they may be able to shift voters\u2019 focus away from Washington, turning anti-incumbent sentiment against a Republican governor or senator.<\/p>\n