Is President Trump tired of winning? Not by a long shot.
More Americans think Trump will win a second term in the White House in 2020, according to a new CNN poll (and you gotta know CNN doesn’t like writing that story!).
“The public is split over whether they think the President will win a second term — 46% say he will and 47% say he won’t. But that’s a steep improvement for him since March, when 54% of adults said they thought he’d lose his bid for a second term. The share seeing a second Trump win in the offing has risen across party lines. The increase is a bit sharper among men (up 8 points), independents (from 39% in March to 47% now) and those who are enthusiastic about voting in this year’s midterms (from 37% in March to 46% now),” CNN said.
The poll was conducted Oct. 4-7, after the debacle over the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.
The CNN survey mirrors other recent polls. With just three weeks to go before Election Day, Republicans are closing the gap with Democrats — especially after the Kavanaugh debacle. In a Quinnipiac University National Poll released Oct. 2, 49 percent of voters said they support the Democratic candidate in their local race for the House of Representatives while 42 percent back the Republican candidate. That 7-point edge is just half of the 52-38 margin in the Sept. 12 survey by Quinnipiac. Their latest poll was conducted Sept. 27-30, after the Senate Judiciary Committee held its final hearing on Judge Kavanaugh but before he was confirmed.
“The numbers suggest the big blue wave may have lost some of its momentum as House races tighten,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll.
The Quinnipiac poll follows a Gallup survey that showed Republicans’ enthusiasm five weeks before the midterm elections was rising fast, putting them neck and neck with Democrats, who held a big margin just weeks ago. “Sixty-one percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners and 58 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners say they are more enthusiastic about voting in November compared to prior elections,” Gallup reported.
“These levels roughly match Republicans’ record-high enthusiasm in 2010, Barack Obama’s first midterm, when the GOP won a whopping 63 seats. But this is the first time in Gallup’s trend since 1994 that both parties have expressed high enthusiasm.”
Most fascinating in the poll is the comparison with 2010. In the first midterms after Mr. Obama was elected — and the first after the passage of Obamacare without a single GOP vote — Democrats got shellacked, losing 63 seats in the House of Representatives, the largest seat change since 1948 and the largest for any midterm election since 1938. Republicans also picked up six seats in the Senate. That rout was even worse across the country: the GOP gained 680 seats in state legislative races, breaking the previous record of 628 set by Democrats in 1974 after the Watergate scandal.
Another new poll, this one by NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist, shows that while Democrats held a 10-point advantage in “enthusiasm” for the election back in July, that margin has dropped to just 2 points after the Kavanaugh hearings.
“The result of hearings, at least in the short run, is the Republican base was awakened,” Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, told NPR.