Ya think? After Democratic leadership pushed yet another stunt vote in the Senate, vulnerable House Democratic incumbents worry that their list of accomplishments in this session might fit within a fortune cookie. Punchbowl reports this with the headline, “Frontliners freak,” and for good reason — they’ve met with voters for the last few days:
Frontline House Democrats – the party’s most endangered incumbents this November – have been pressing party leaders in recent days to step up legislative efforts to save their majority.
The roughly 30 House Democrats have long known the political headwinds are against them this yea. Redistricting, inflation, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, an uneven economy are all big problems. Add to that, the fact that the party in power generally loses seats in the midterms.
But many of these vulnerable Democrats returned to Washington after a week at home particularly spooked. Their frustrations are running high. They’re worried about a lack of legislative victories in 2022. And they badly want Democratic leaders and committee chairs to push more bills that help address the concerns of everyday Americans.
In other words, these Democrats want their leaders to do something to try to reverse the party’s political fortunes before it’s too late.
Why the “freakout”? The RCP aggregate average on generic ballot polling makes the problem very clear:
Best guess: these House Democrats went home and found out that this data is even more accurate than they feared. Don’t forget, too, that the structure of those polls usually mean that Democrats have to have a lead of +5 just to hold serve. An R+3 result portends disaster, and these incumbent House Dems know it. I’d bet that more than 30 of them are worried about it too.
So now they belatedly want to work on issues that matter, but just what are the “concerns of everyday Americans”? Inflation takes the top position, an issue on which Democrats from Joe Biden on down have attempted to gaslight voters for months. Biden himself tried blaming a lack of response to inflation on Republicans this week, for instance, and the White House had to clean that up later by insisting that Biden knew that he, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are all Democrats.
After inflation, voters will prioritize other issues that touch their lives every day. Crime, for instance, will matter greatly — and progressives still want to talk about defunding the police. Shortages of basic staples at the grocery store and other supply-chain issues will matter in their vote choice, and right now parents of infants can’t find formula to feed their children, thanks to months of supply-chain fumbling by the Biden administration. Having to strap masks on faces whenever traveling might come into play, too.
Whether a “pregnant person” can find an abortion in the 39th week of pregnancy? Not so much. The same is true for insider-baseball nonsense like the filibuster, and big-spending bills on climate change when monetary expansions for big government spending programs set inflation on fire in the first place.
It’s amusing that it took this long for incumbent Democrats to “suddenly” realize that their phony baloney jobs are at risk. And they may find out that Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden don’t really care, and will simply keep harrumphing all the way to a red wave in November.
