Ten Points Won't Survive an Envelope

Democrats Have Their Best Party-Identification Numbers Since 2008, and the Rules Are Being Rewritten Underneath Them

Good news, everybody! The numbers for the Democrats are the best they’ve looked in 18 years. I just wanted to say that plainly before I, you know, ruin it: voters also still hate them.

Gallup’s second-quarter tracking has forty-nine percent of Americans identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic against thirty-nine percent for Republicans. Ten points is not nothing—it’s the biggest voter ID advantage they’ve had in years. In fact, it’s the widest gap either party has held in Gallup’s quarterly numbers in over a decade, and on the leaned measure you have to go back to 2008 to find anything like it.

Straight identification, no leaners: thirty-one percent Democratic, twenty-five percent Republican, a six-point edge and the biggest since 2015. Independents are sitting at forty-four percent, which is its own story we can talk about some other time. Trump’s approval is parked in the thirties with disapproval near sixty. The generic congressional ballot runs about six points blue, which is the neighborhood the party was in before it picked up forty-one House seats in 2018.

That is a genuinely good hand. The trouble with a good hand is that you still have to play it, and in this case that’s tricky, because not one point of that lead is affection.

The Democratic Party’s own favorability is underwater at roughly 44 favorable to 52 unfavorable. Net minus eight. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, sits at 31-50 favorable/unfavorable, which is a net of minus nineteen, which is a number you’d expect from a regional airline after a bad week of losing everyone’s luggage. Congress as an institution polls at 18% (!!), an approval rating that puts it somewhere between a parking ticket and a root canal.

When pollsters stopped offering multiple choice and asked people to describe the Democratic Party in their own words, one word came back over and over: weak. Thirty percent of the substantive answers from Democrats—Democrats, their own people—said the party is too cautious, too careful, not fighting hard enough. Another seventeen percent went out of their way to bring up the party caving during the shutdown, unprompted, months later, like a grudge you keep in a drawer. Independents had a different complaint and it was worse: they said they don’t know what the party stands for.

Nobody in that data is choosing Democrats. They’re evacuating Republicans. A Columbia political scientist put it about as bluntly as an academic gets: the identification edge “is now driven fully by rejection or support for Trump and his policies.” Gallup’s own analyst said the same thing in gentler clothes—when things go badly, people move away from the party in charge. It’s not a courtship. It’s a fire drill, and Democrats are standing in the parking lot taking credit for the weather.

The drift is also generational, which is the part that should be keeping somebody in Washington awake. In Gallup’s annual numbers, fifty-six percent of Gen Z and fifty-four percent of millennials call themselves independents. Forty-two percent of my own cohort does. The people who will decide the next twenty years of American politics are declining to join either team, and one of those teams has spent a decade assuming they’ll come around on their own.

Now here’s where I get to be the old guy with the tape.

In 2014, independents hit what was then a record forty-three percent. Democrats were polling better than Republicans on favorability. Every environmental indicator that pundits treat as destiny was pointing the right direction. Democrats then lost nine Senate seats and the majority, and the analysts who track this stuff will tell you flatly that there is zero correlation between party favorability a year out and how the election actually goes. I watched 1994 happen. I watched 2010 happen, the one Obama himself called a shellacking. I have now seen this specific movie enough times to know that the part where everyone feels good about the polling is not the third act. It’s the cold open.

And while the party admires its crosstabs, the other side is doing something concrete about the envelopes.

There is a Postal Service rule right now that would impose new standards on mail ballots and require states to hand over voter data before anything goes out. A federal judge blocked parts of it on August twenty-seventh. The administration ran to the Supreme Court on September third and asked the justices to let it take effect anyway. Responses were due this week. North Carolina and Alabama started mailing ballots yesterday, which means the envelopes are already moving while the rule that governs them is still being litigated—and the government’s own filing argued the urgency, noting that once ballots enter the mailstream there is no retrieving them.

That is what an opposition party that intends to win looks like. It looks like a legal filing about paper stock. A ten-point advantage in party identification does not survive a fight over envelope design, because party identification is a feeling and envelope design is a rule, and rules eat feelings for breakfast every single time.

So, the assignment for all of us.

The lead converts through the unglamorous hard work or it doesn’t convert at all. Secretary of state races, which nobody puts on a tote bag and which decide whether your ballot counts. Election-protection lawyers, funded now, in place before November instead of assembled in a panic on the eleventh. Rides to the polls, because in a lot of states the polling place that used to be six blocks away is now across town on purpose. Down-ballot candidates in races the national party has already written off, which is how you find out you were wrong about a district. And most of all, actual backbone and fight from the national Democrats, because thirty percent of your own voters just told you in writing that “weak” is the word they reach for, and the fix for that is not another sternly worded letter.

Forty-nine to thirty-nine is real. It’s also on loan. The voters won’t hand Democrats a victory—they will them a restraining order against the other guy, and those expire.

Thanks for reading!

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