Within the Margin

Just a quick thought for tonight.

A new Economist/YouGov poll finds healthy Democratic leads in the generic congressional ballot – and poor Trump approval numbers – for the population at large. Even more notably, it finds Trump and congressional Republicans continuing to lose ground among college-educated white voters, who once provided the bulwark of support for Republicans. A 49%-40% edge for Democrats among these voters in the upcoming Congressional elections is remarkable, given much of American political history…and given their propensity to actually vote in midterm elections. These folks are a good bet to show up – education tends to be a strong indicator of turnout in midterms.

But it also means that 40% of college-educated white voters have looked at the first 19 months of the Trump presidency and Congressional Republicans playing dead in the face of the excesses of said presidency…and have decided they’re still totally cool with that.

We win these things on the margins, in the end. We sign up for that level of uncertainty, and we rise and fall with small changes. This set of changes looks promising. But this poll is a sobering reminder of how fine those margins are – because we cannot count on sensibility on the part of a significant minority who are otherwise thought to be credentialed, informed individuals.