The Kavanaugh Debacle
Has Energized Voters on Both Sides
By
Jillian S. Ambroz
But then Kavanaugh’s Trump-like vitriol, anger and
partisanship during that process fired up the Trump base and surprisingly still
managed to earn him a seat on the bench of the nation’s highest court where
temperament and non-partisanship are typically the gold standards.
As many have mused
lately, Trump has managed to tarnish even the Supreme Court.
As we inch closer to
Election Day, what does this mean for Democrats and the so-called Blue Wave?
It seems Democrats still have a solid chance of taking back the House. In fact, just this past week, The Cook Political Report moved ratings changes on eight more House seats toward Democrats, from New York to Utah.
At this point, the
newsletter predicts “the likeliest outcome to be a Democratic gain between 25
and 40 seats.” Democrats need to pick up 23 seats to gain control of Congress.
FiveThirtyEight forecast that Democrats had a 74% chance of taking back the House as
of Oct. 6, 2018.
But the Kavanaugh
debacle makes the Senate a lot harder to predict because it gets to the
question of voter turnout, which is always hard to accurately predict. Though
on Oct. 6, FiveThirtyEight forecast Democrats had a 22% chance of
winning back the Senate.
Democrats were already
super energized about the midterms. Democrats voting in primaries in the first
31 states to hold elections this year, stormed the polls by an increase of 84%
over 2014, according to research conducted by the Pew Research Center in July.
There has also been a
notable widening gender gap this election cycle.
A Pew Research Poll released
on Oct. 1, 2018, showed a majority of women disapproved of Trump’s job
performance by 63% (with 30% approving) compared with 46% of men who approved
of his performance.
Women are favoring
Democrats by a 10-point gap over men, who favor Republicans by 5 points, which
makes for a total gap of 15-points on the
generic ballot, according to a recent The Economist/YouGov poll.
Now, add some gasoline
in the name of Brett Kavanaugh to that bonfire of female voters casting ballots
on Trump’s referendum and treatment of women and that Blue Wave could become a
tsunami that snatches up endangered GOP Senate seats like Ted Cruz’s in Texas
or Marsha Blackburn’s in Tennessee, not to mention the open seats like the one
in Arizona Jeff Flake is abandoning.
But the Kavanaugh
confirmation process, while fanning the flames on the left, chummed the waters
for Trump’s base and may have energized them enough to lull them out of
complacency to get out the vote and retain those precious Senate seats.
Recent polling by The
New York Times Upshot/Siena College showed that support for Kavanaugh aligned
very closely with voters’ opinions of Trump’s job approval. Basically, if a voter liked Trump, they’d like
Kavanaugh and vice-versa.
For example, where
Trump was unpopular, like the suburban Twin Cities area where his job approval
rating was at 38% at the time of the poll, support for Kavanaugh was at 43%.
But in the more
conservative Cincinnati suburbs, Trump had a job approval rating of 48% and
Kavanaugh’s support there was at 51%.
The advantage here for
the GOP going forward into the midterms is in the districts where the president
is near a 50% job-approval rating because Republicans do better in polarized,
partisan fights, according to The Cook Political Report.
However, that may not
hold true post-Kavanaugh. These have become ugly times.
And now that Kavanaugh
has been confirmed there’s a chance that Trump’s base – the angry white male –
will once again slip into dormancy thanks to that victory. They got what they
wanted, didn’t they? In fact, they got a little more than they asked for: A
Supreme Court seat and a performance, albeit cringe-worthy.