ABC News Journalist: Looking Bad for Dems in Midterms, Close Polling Means Republican Win
ABC News national correspondent Terry Moran said Sunday that the Democrats election prospects are not looking good less than a month away from the midterms.
He added that close polling should be no comfort to Democrats, given how Republicans have been under-surveyed in recent election cycles.
ABC News “This Week” host Martha Raddatz noted Democrats had been fairly hopeful in the summer as polling swung in their direction. “Do you still get that sense?” she asked Moran.
“Nope. I think the air went out of that balloon. In part because the economy is so tough for so many people,” he answered.
“Food prices, rent spiking. If they’ve got retirement funds, those are evaporating and even the issue of abortion, which did drive several special elections and that remarkable referendum result in Kansas,” Moran continued.
“While there are millions of people that [abortion] will be the number one issue, I just think economic headwinds are so tough, and [President Joe] Biden, he just doesn’t have the oomph as a candidate anymore,” he said.
A little over a month after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Kansans voted against an amendment that would have overturned a state Supreme Court ruling that there is a constitutional right to obtain an abortion.
A Monmouth University Poll released last week found the top issue for respondents was inflation with 82 percent saying it’s extremely or very important to them. The next was crime (72 percent), elections and voting (70 percent), jobs/unemployment (68 percent) and immigration (67 percent).
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Abortion, which many Democrat candidates have emphasized in their campaigns, registered as an extremely or very important issue with 56 percent of those surveyed.
Moran argued another fact is that Republicans are apparently participating less in polls.
“I would also say in this country and a lot of countries the polls are broken,” he said.
“It is clear that lots of people on the right just don’t answer anymore. They were worse in 2020 than they were in 2016. And look at those polls and it’s close, it’s a Republican win,” he added.
The Real Clear Politics average of polls for the generic congressional ballot shows the GOP with a slight lead at 0.9 percent.
In 2020, the Democrats were up 6.8 percent.
They ended up losing a net of 12 seats in the House, though on the Senate side they did net 3 seats, flipping one in Arizona, one in Colorado and two in Georgia, while losing one in Alabama.
In 2016, Democrats were up in the RCP congressional ballot by 0.6 percent and gained six seats in the House and two seats in the Senate.
However, Republican Donald Trump won the White House despite being down 3.2 percent in the RCP average to Democrat Hillary Clinton.
