While Democrats enjoyed a summer bounce in generic congressional preference surveys, several key indicators point to the Democratic Party sustaining considerable losses in House, Senate, and gubernatorial races in November, similar to results of the 1994 midterms during Bill Clinton’s presidency, election experts told The Epoch Times.
In 1994, the Democrats lost 54 U.S. House seats to the Republicans, culminating in the election of Newt Gingrich to the House speakership, along with the Republican pickup of eight U.S. Senate seats and the gain of 10 gubernatorial seats for the GOP.
“Looking at the aggregate number of people who have cast a ballot in each major party primary, we see a clear turnout advantage for the Republicans, compared to the 2018 midterm election, with Republicans up just under 48 percent in primary turnout nationally, while the Democrats are down just over 18 percent,” private pollster Jim Ellis of Ellis Insight told The Epoch Times.
‘Enthusiasm Gap’
The turnout numbers highlight an important “enthusiasm gap” that could again leave the public media pollsters—as opposed to private campaign pollsters—with egg on their faces in November, according to experts interviewed by The Epoch Times.
“The numbers, they seem pretty accurate from being on the ground,” said Conor Maguire, a principal and managing director at WPA Intelligence, a polling firm that specializes in electing conservatives.
In the primaries where WPA participated, they saw massive turnout by GOP voters, he said. Maguire also noted an additional indication of the trend away from Democrats in 2022.
“We saw 20-25 percent of the Republican primary voters had never even voted in a Republican primary before they had come out for the first time this year,” Maguire told The Epoch Times.
According to Maguire, WPA, unlike many of the public media polls, does surveys that help inform candidates how to win races, and contain a lot less ideological bias than widely distributed media polling.
“It doesn’t behoove us to give our candidates a rosy picture of the situation. That’s not how we win,” Maguire said, noting that if candidates are down by 5 points, they need to know about it.
By John Ransom
