Conservatives need to wake up and start thinking past the rapidly passing age of Obama. Increasingly likely every day is that voters this November will remove Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader. By electing a new Republican Senate majority, the voters will also render Barack Obama a lame duck, one of the lamest in history, as he will have no prayer of getting any of his legislative proposals — increasingly recognized as hard left — through Congress. (Despite his early national rhetoric, Obama doesn’t do bipartisanship.)That sounds awesome!
That new Republican Senate majority will also be a new check and balance on Obama’s appointment of federal judges, reversing the effect of the Reid rule change eliminating Republican judicial filibusters. That is especially crucial given that the five remaining Reagan/Bush appointees on the Court constitute the slimmest of majorities, with a couple of occasionally weak sisters among them. If just one of these five is replaced by another Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor, the resulting shift from a Reagan majority on the Court to an Obama one would mean a longer-term Obama transformation of America.
Given the long-term cycles of American political history, Obama’s second midterm this year should be even worse for Democrats than the disastrous Obama first midterm in 2010. And the polls are bearing out that possibility.
The latest is a Pew/USA Today poll finding that 47 percent favor the Republican candidate for Congress in their district or state, while 43 percent favor the Democrat. That is a sharp turnaround from last October, when Democrats held a 6 point lead in the same generic midterm preference poll, 49 percent to 43 percent. The new Pew poll also finds a 16 point GOP lead among independent voters.
Moreover, the Pew poll finds that “65% would like to see the next President offer different policies and programs from the Obama Administration while 30 percent want Obama’s successor to offer similar policies,” as reported by Jason Riley in the May 5 Wall Street Journal.
In an April 27 Washington Post/ABC News poll, President Obama’s approval rating was down to an all-time low of 41 percent. That poll featured an 11 point Democratic advantage in the sample, which indicates further weakness in that Obama support, especially as compared to the 2010 midterm turnout rather than the 2012 turnout.
For context, in April 2010, President Obama’s job approval in that Washington Post/ABC News poll was 54 percent. In October 2010, just before the voters administered their first midterm beating to Democrats, Obama’s job approval was still 50 percent.
Similarly, the April Gallup poll showed an Obama approval rating of 43 percent, compared to an April 2010 Obama approval rating in that poll of 49 percent, and an early November 2010 approval rating of 44 percent. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found Obama’s job approval at 44 percent, compared to a May 11, 2010 approval of 50 percent, and an October 30, 2010 approval of 45 percent. So consistently in all these polls, Obama was doing better in 2010 just before that year’s Democrat blowout than he is doing this year.
The Washington Post/ABC News poll also found only 42 percent approval of Obama’s handling of the economy, lower than the 44 percent in the October 2010 poll. Most damning of all, 53 percent in the 2014 poll say it is more important to have Republican congressional majorities to check Obama’s policies, compared to 39 percent who believe it is more important to have Democratic congressional majorities to support those policies.
Bottom line in that poll, 45 percent say they plan to vote for Democratic candidates for Congress this fall, compared to 44 percent who say they plan to vote for Republican congressional candidates. But in October 2010, the Washington Post/ABC News poll showed Democrats with a 5-point advantage on that question, just before voters granted Republicans a 63-seat gain in the House, and a 6 to 7 seat gain in the Senate (depending on how you count the November 2010 affirmation of Scott Brown’s special election pickup of Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat).
These polls above, and state by state polls, are consistent with a Republican pickup in this fall’s midterm of as many as 10 Senate seats, establishing a new 55 to 45 Republican Senate majority, and 20 more House seats. To maximize that victory, Republicans need to campaign on a pro-growth platform of specific reforms to get America booming again as under Reagan. But in designing those proposals, conservative and Republican candidates, think tanks, publications, and policy intellectuals need to think past what can possibly be compromised with President Obama, and take their case for populist, pro-growth reforms directly to the people.
And it's also in line with what I've been saying all year: The Democrats are going to get hammered. It's gonna be a bloodbath.
More at the link.
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