This ad above is almost a decade old but it still gets right to the essence of who New York's accidental governor, Kathy Hochul, is. So wrong for New York! And according to a new Siena poll her job performance ratings from New York voters is pretty abysmal-- 36% approve and 57% disapprove. "Hochul’s overall job performance rating," said pollster Steven Greenberg, the worst it’s ever been, is 21 points under water, after being 11 points under water last month and just two points under water at the start of the year." And yet every poll also shows her winning the gubernatorial nomination June 28 and the November election. It probably didn't help that last week her hand-picked lieutenant governor, Brain Benjamin, was arrested by the Feds for taking bribes and has since been forced to resign. Her $1.4 billion Buffalo Bills stadium plan, which fleeces NY taxpayers, is backed by less than a quarter of New Yorkers.
As horrible as disgraced ex-governor Andrew Cuomo is, if he jumps into the race he'd come closest to beating her-- although not close enough. None of the other candidates-- Tom Suozzi, who's challenging her from the right and Jumaane Williams, who's challenging her from the left-- are even in double digits.
Conventional wisdom is that she's on her way to victory anyway. Suozzi insists on painting himself further right than she is-- which he probably isn't-- and Republican Lee Zeldin is further right than she is... much further right. And the hollow media narrative is that Williams' progressive agenda is wrong for the times.
Take a look at this tweet from White House chief of staff Ron Klain celebrating how well the lesser-of-two-evils strategy-- the only electoral strategy the Democrats have employed since the Clinton era-- worked out in France.
Macron's substantial 58.5% to 41.5% triumph over fascist Marine Le Pen came despite Macron's horrendous 36% approval. He sucks; she sucks worse. Biden is terrible, Trump is incalculably more terrible. According to the newest YouGov poll for The Economist, Biden's approval among registered voters is a dismal 45% with 52% disapproving. Trump is in about the same situation with the voters-- 44% favorable and 51% unfavorable. And if Trump dies or winds up in prison, the most likely GOP nominee, Ron DeSantis, has a 42% favorable score and a 36% unfavorable score (21% of respondents not knowing enough about him to form a judgment yet). This is the only way the careerist Democrat Establishment fights elections since the Clinton era. They don't even believe in themselves or their wretched Big Tent politics any longer.
Republican leaders are all underwater with voters. Only 31% have a favorable opinion of McCarthy, as opposed to 44% who have an unfavorable opinion and McConnell is in even worse shape-- 24% favorable, 62% unfavorable. Neither party is well liked:
Democratic Party-
favorable: 44%
Unfavorable: 52%
Republican Party-
favorable: 42%
Unfavorable: 53%
And when asked who they would vote for if congressional elections were today, 43% said Democrats and 38% said Republicans. Because of gerrymandering, a 5 point advantage in this kind of generic polling isn't enough for a good outcome for Democrats. Among voters under 30-- the least likely age cohort of voters to show up at the polls-- 51% say they would vote for a Democrat for Congress and just 20% said they would vote for a Republican.
Yesterday, writing for CNN, polling expert Harry Enten was much less pessimistic about young voter turnout than everyone else is. Everyone I know says Biden and the Dems will lose the midterms because they haven't accomplished anything-- and especially not in the areas young voters care about most: the Climate Crisis, affordable housing, student loan forgiveness, legalized marijuana and raising the minimum wage. He wrote that Biden's problem with young voters isn't contagious and that Democratic candidates are largely insulated from it. "Biden’s popularity among young Americans," he wrote, "went from being higher than any other age group to being lower than almost any other age group. Sometimes, however, approval ratings don’t tell the whole story. In this case, these approval ratings might suggest that the Democrats will lose among young voters in the midterm elections. A look at the generic ballot, on other hand, indicates that would be wrong... When voters under 30 were asked who they would vote for in their congressional district, Democrats held a 48% to 29% advantage over the Republicans. That 48% vote share and 19-point lead were better from Democrats than responses from any other age group... [E]ven if Biden isn’t liked by most young Americans, Republicans haven’t come anywhere close to sealing the deal with them."
One more thing: candidates matter. Under the Democratic establishment lesser-of-two evils strategy, they don't matter much because the whole race is about which party sucks less. To Democrats, the election in November and in 2024 are all about Trump and GOP freaks like QAnon twins Marjorie Traitor Greene and Lauren Boebert, sex predator Matt Gaetz and Nazi cross-dresser Madison Cawthorn. That allows the Democratic establishment to offer garbage candidates that no one gets excited about and who have nothing to offer and who turn out like Kyrsten Sinema if they get elected. Think Senate candidates Conor Lamb (PA), Val Demings (FL) and Tim Ryan (OH) or House candidates like Don Davis (NC), Robert Garcia (CA) and Max Rose (NY)... not to mention putrid incumbents like Henry Cuellar (TX), Kurt Schrader (OR), Rick Larsen (WA), Brad Sherman (CA), Ed Case (HI), Dwight Evans (PA), Scott Peters (CA), Shontel Brown (OH), Lou Correa (CA) and Juan Vargas (CA).
The opposite is when an independent-minded candidate like Lucas Kunce-- not part of or beholden to the corrupt, broken Democrat machine-- shows up and catches fire on his own. Who would think a Democrat could win statewide in Missouri. Not the Democratic Party. But Missouri voters are gravitating-- and with huge enthusiasm-- towards Kunce, who never parrots the party line and is campaigning for Missourians, not for DC Dems. I don't even think they want him to win-- his ideas about reform are not what the establishment is interested in-- and they just threw some random billionaire heiress into the primary against him. That isn't working out too well for them so far. This is a polling memo from PPP:
A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that in the 2022 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Missouri, Marine veteran Lucas Kunce has a 7 point lead over Trudy Busch Valentine (25-18). With already consolidated political support both locally and nationally, a populist message, and strong grassroots fundraising, Kunce is outpacing Trudy Buch Valentine, despite a famous family name.
