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I am not too worried about next year's midterm elections. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-05-12

Do you remember that dreaded poll from a month or two ago about Democratic Party approval being an abysmal 27-28 percent? I can bet you that most if not all of that anger was directed primarily at Chuck Schumer and that small minority of Senators who voted for cloture on that horrible budget bill, not necessarily the party as a whole. I would like to think that the vast majority of Americans, including at least 95 percent of us who regularly or often cast blue ballots in elections, know that the rest of the party is not Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, etc. Every single Democrat who was present in the House voted no on that bill. The majority of Democratic Senators also voted no on cloture. So, it is not the entire party. It is just a small minority in the party that is ruining it for us. (If you still to this day do not think Democrats are doing enough for us, I would like to refer you to Dfh1's efforts titled "Still Think Democrats Aren't Fighting Back?", or Janesaunt's series called "[Tuesday/Thursday/Sunday] edition of lots of Dems doing what we want them to do.")

And also, the above ABC News/The Washington Post poll showing more Americans allegedly trusting the Orange Dude to handle America's problems? Come on. This poll is already going on a month old and the corporate media is still making a big deal out of it to this day. I would not consider 37 percent to be a number worth celebrating. I agreed with most of what diarist Mark Sumner said in his recent piece highlighting this poll, but I think he was conceding defeat way too early. It is only May 2025. We still have about 540 days until the midterm elections, which is exactly 18 months or 1½ years. A lot can (and will) change between now and then.

So what is up with those negative numbers? Well, they are....polls! The media thrives off of them. They like to exaggerate them and pin them against our party whenever they have the opportunity.

Polls cannot be trusted for a number of reasons. These include, but are not necessarily limited to:

Respondents lying to them.

Poll questions being worded in a way such that it confuses respondents, throws them off, or gets them to respond with answers that the pollster desires.

Statistical bias (I will come back to this in a moment).

Speaking of polls, let me take an opportunity to share a true story from more than a decade ago.

A TRUE STORY

I turned 18 years of age in 2005, and at the time, I was a registered Republican. I will foolishly admit that I voted straight red in two midterm elections and one presidential election from 2006 to 2010. (Thankfully, I lost those first two elections, and a Democratic president was sitting for the last of the three, so hopefully all of you can forgive me. Plus, I was young and not aware of the issues.) Then came the TEA Party movement. This was when the tables turned. After a year or two of witnessing the total insanity of the TEA Party, and how they were starting to lose their minds and go full-blown extremist, I simply could not call myself a Republican anymore. My affiliation with the GOP was rather short-lived. In 2012 and every election since, I have voted blue, and vow to stay that way.

One day between 2012 and 2014, not long after my connection with the GOP was finished, I was contacted by what I suspected was a right-leaning national polling company (as I was still a registered Republican). It was an automated message and they insisted that I respond to them, and I hung up because I did not want to participate. About two hours later, they called me again with the same message. I hung up a second time. They called a third time not long after, and I hung up again. They phoned me about five or six times in that very same day. They demanded that I respond; they would not take no for an answer. Thankfully, it only lasted a day, and I did not get any borderline harassing calls from them after that.

This led me to speculate that the alleged polling company was only contacting specific people, and that the data they were collecting was not truly random. They were just cherry-picking their respondents. So, if you ask me, it sounds like they were trying their best to skew their results to their liking. (By the way, this was the one and only time that a suspected polling company called me. I have not been contacted by another one since.)

This is another good example of why we should not take polls too seriously, and there is no doubt in my mind that they have gotten progressively worse with their bias over the years. I am a college mathematics instructor, and in statistics, this very scenario is an example of statistical bias. This is when the methods used to gather data are not representative of the population as a whole. The respondents may be preselected in order to establish a desired outcome.

WHAT IS MY PREDICTION?

Well, considering the fact that, thanks to the Orange Madman's baseless and senseless tariff war…

The stock market is already tumbling, Mass layoffs appear to already be underway, The cost of groceries and consumer goods has shot way up, Americans are already finding ways to spend less money, and The rest of the Western world is engaging in a literal “Don’t Buy American” campaign,

I project that by the summer of next year,

The Dow and Nasdaq averages will be less than half of what they are now, and Our national unemployment rate will be skyrocketing, probably at least 20 percent and possibly as high as 30.

In other words, a severe economic recession, if not a premature depression. Not good for America. Also not good for the Orange Dude and his ass-licking cowards in Congress. And if this is exactly what happens, people all across the country are going to be furious as hell in time for the midterms, even more so than they already are. Voters will be pumped up and more motivated than ever, and the turnout numbers will be high enough to where right-wing voter suppression tactics and gerrymandering likely will be ineffective. We may see a turnout rate much like 2020 as well as election results similar to what we saw in 2006 and 2008.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are going to win back the House, and there is a reasonable chance that we could defy the current odds and take back the Senate also. We will most likely get a slim majority in the Senate at best, but frankly, I will take anything that stands in the way of Number 47 and Project 2025. All we have to do is keep our current 47-seat count and win at least five extra seats, and this is very doable if you ask me. I think John Ossoff's seat in Georgia is fairly safe now that Brian Kemp will not be running. I have every reason to believe that if Mallory McMorrow secures the nomination for Gary Peters' Senate seat in my home state of Michigan, she will win in a landslide. In my opinion, the GOP seats we have the best shot at flipping are Susan Collins' seat in Maine, along with Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, and North Carolina. These latter five are not necessarily deep red states in my book, and we very well could pick any or perhaps all of these up. Florida and Texas are distinct possibilities as well, but I am not holding my hopes high for them; these are two states that seem to enjoy voting against their own interests. (Or it could just be severe suppression tactics, something Texas surely is notorious for.)

Right now, I am giving our side an 80+ percent chance of taking the House and a 50-60 percent chance of breaking the 52-seat mark in the Senate. We should try to aim for 52 so that John Fetterman's vote will not matter, unless Fetterman gets challenged in a primary in Pennsylvania next year and loses. However, the more seats we win, the better for us.

Even if we do not win the Senate but still take back the House, it will cut our current hell by at least 40 percent.

ALSO, ONE LAST WORD ABOUT THOSE 2026 AND 2028 ELECTION CLAIMS…

To this day, people are still peddling the belief that there will not be elections in 2026 or 2028, or that elections will not be free and fair by then. Each and every person who has said this has yet to provide any concrete physical evidence proving this. So far, I have seen none. You do not know this, so please stop.

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