I am not attempting to fuel whatever irrational exuberance those conservatives among our readership might be feeling today. It’s my experience that irrational exuberance among conservatives is in quite short supply these days anyway; that’s mostly been true since George W. Bush sucked it out of the movement in his second term.
And especially since Barack Obama put the anti-American Hard Left in charge of the Democrat Party and then put the Democrat Party in charge of the country, the problem among conservatives and even just ordinary Americans who hate the country has been a tendency toward despair rather than toward irrational exuberance.
But this data point, which comes from Gallup, one of the polling organizations out there that can generally be trusted, could be fuel for exuberance — whether irrational or otherwise:
#NEW NATIONAL party identification tracker
🔴 Republican: 49% (+7)
🔵 Democratic: 42%Gallup | Oct. 1-12
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 16, 2024
Upon seeing that number, conservative pollster Rich Baris was, well, exuberant:
Baris reacts to Gallup’s final party ID of R+7: “Holy shit. Oh my God. That’s the final Gallup ID. You do realize that, right? I think that’s their final. Oh my God.”
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 16, 2024
The official number Gallup is using has a 48–45 Republican advantage, as it’s the average over the course of the 2024 cycle Gallup has polled. The GOP bulge grew to R+7 over the last round of polling in the two weeks prior to the report.
Even at R+3, you’re looking at an eye-popping, historical result predictive of something quite Trumpian happening in three weeks. Here’s a historical look at Gallup’s party ID survey in presidential cycles over the past 30 years or so:
Somewhat related to this would be Donald Trump’s runaway performance on Polymarket of late, where he’s now a 60–40 favorite.
Two obvious questions immediately come to mind: First, is this true? And second, does it matter?
We’ll take on the second question first. The answer is: Hell Yes, It Matters.
Don’t forget that these media polls that have Kamala Harris holding onto a tight lead, or keeping the race tied, generally show a bias toward the Left on the basis of a sample anywhere from 3 to 7 points more Democrat than Republican.
Much of that is driven by response bias, which we’ve discussed in this column before. Older, white, leftist women — just think of them as MSNBC viewers — are the most aggressive responders to political surveys, and have been for a good while. There are several reasons for this, but the three most obvious are that (1) government is God to these people, so anything having to do with politics will immediately get their attention, (2) they generally don’t get a whole lot of engagement in their lives beyond a small number of people (other than whatever happens on social media, of course), and (3) everybody else screens their calls because they’re busy.
Gallup is a little different story, though. If you get something from Gallup, given its reputation, you’re more likely to answer it. And they don’t do a lot of horse-race polling; Gallup surveys are much more general and focused on public attitudes rather than X or Y candidate. That lends itself to a broader response.
So if Gallup says the country is R+7, and they turn out to be right, it’s a very big deal. It indicates that the polling model used by the vast majority of these media polls you’ve been scratching your head over for a month is horribly flawed.
If you’re running multistate or national polls with a D+4 sample and the electorate turns out to be R+7 (or functionally R+7; what this means is Republicans are catching a very sizable majority of the independent voters this cycle), then you could well be off by 10 or 12 points in your findings.
And it isn’t just a sign Donald Trump is underpolling. You could be seeing a half-dozen or more Republican candidates for the Senate who are showing little deficits against incumbent Democrats in those various media polls all of a sudden pull upset victories.
So yeah. This is, as Kamala Harris Campaign Saboteur Joe Biden once said, “a big f**king deal.”
But is it true?
That’s up to you to decide, at least for the next three weeks or so — and we’ll find out for sure on Nov. 5.
Having thus hedged my bets, what I can say is that it isn’t really so shocking that America would look to the GOP this time.
Let’s not forget that Republicans outvoted Democrats by a sizable seven million votes in the last national election cycle. We were all surprised and, on the conservative side, disappointed that the expected red wave didn’t fully materialize in 2022, but when you consider that there was an 81 million to 69 million margin in Joe Biden’s favor in 2020 that flipped over to a seven million vote advantage for the GOP in 2022, you’re looking at some reasonable portion of a 19-million vote swing in two years.
How much better have things gotten for the Democrats since then? Here are just a few of the more obvious reasons why Gallup’s R+7 might just be a real number.
They’ve watched as the Ukraine war has dragged on with no effort made at bringing it to a close so the billions of dollars in deficit spending we’re sending over there could be stopped. And then they watched Oct. 7 and the Israeli response that has now turned into a straight-up war between Israel and Iran, the IDF having more or less cleared Iran’s Hamas and Hezbollah proxies off the table. What’s the Biden administration doing? Weakly calling for a ceasefire as our ally whips the rear end of our enemy. How many Americans like the Biden foreign policy and its results?
They’ve also watched the border, and the administration’s continuing refusal to do anything to stop the bleeding there. Nobody really believes Biden and Kamala Harris when they claim the border is under control and crossings are down. Apprehensions might be down, but if there are more gotaways and less apprehendees, that’s pretty cold comfort, isn’t it? Not to mention we now have the satanic miracle of the CBP One app, which has resulted in your tax dollars being spent to fly migrants into towns like Springfield, Ohio, Charleroi, Pennsylvania, and Fairhope, Alabama direct from their home countries — no perilous journey across the border needed. Survey after survey shows the public is beyond exasperated with immigration and border policy, and when even members of the Democrats’ traditional base, most notably black and Hispanic men, are throwing up their hands in disgust, you can imagine it might affect the party ID numbers.
Oh, and nobody thinks the Great Replacement Theory is some conspiracy-nut story anymore. I’m not sure anybody ever did, but when Democrats went all-out to block voter ID or policies like the SAVE Act, which would have put teeth into stopping illegals and other non-citizens from voting, the mask really fell off. There is zero reason you would oppose voter ID or the SAVE Act unless you’re actively trying to turn out illegal votes. This is a tell, and everybody knows it. Sooner or later, it would piss off marginal Democrats who might just identify with a different party.
Nobody believes Biden and Harris’ pat lines about economic policy anymore. Everybody realizes Bidenomics is a bust by now, as housing costs, grocery bills, insurance premiums, auto payments, and every other damn thing is more expensive by a lot, not a little, and wages aren’t keeping up.
How can they? We have a fundamentally dysfunctional economy where too much economic power is in the hands of too few corporations that are connected to our political ruling class in too many corrupt ways, and everything the Obama/Biden/Harris political team has done over the past 16 years has fueled our transition into something that looks way too much like old-style Italian fascist economics. People might not understand this as such, but they definitely recognize something is wrong. And it isn’t like you can send Kamala out there to fix it with a word salad.
Then there’s the culture. Mark Mitchell from Rasmussen Reports, on his Monday podcast, noted that Trump was beating Harris by 16 points with men in a Pennsylvania poll they had just released, while her advantage on Trump with women was just 8 points. The Harris campaign is utterly incompetent at attracting men — in fact, it’s the most male-repellent political campaign we’ve ever seen. The whole thing rests on an insane, extreme, no-holds-barred abortion stance that might resound with single females but doesn’t really fly with anybody else. And with Trump largely sidestepping abortion this cycle, all Team Harris is doing is digging a bigger and bigger hole while the media cheers them on.
Maybe abortion will end up being the thing that saves Harris. I don’t really think so.
If Gallup’s numbers are correct and this is really an R+7 electorate, nothing can save her. And she’s going to be one of a whole host of Democrats getting rightly repudiated on Election Night.
If those numbers are correct, that is.
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