On Wednesday afternoon, I spoke with a leading Republican political consultant about the Senate campaign in Georgia. That race is strategically significant for both parties, but it has a special symbolic importance for Democrats. The incumbent, Raphael Warnock, who for many years has occupied Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Atlanta, is seen as a potential national leader of the Democratic Party—and he may still lose to a scandal-ridden ex-football star, the Republican Herschel Walker. The Republican consultant told me that Warnock’s prospects were even bleaker than many recent public polls suggest. “There isn’t a single private poll in America that has Herschel Walker anything but ahead,” the Republican consultant told me. “Not one.”
The consensus among a number of G.O.P. pollsters and operatives I spoke to this week is that in the Senate races that are thought to be competitive, Republican candidates are heading for a clean sweep: Mehmet Oz will beat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and not just by a point or two; Adam Laxalt looks pretty certain to defeat the incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada; even less regarded candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona will be carried into office by a predicted wave. “He won’t deserve it, but I think at this point he falls into a Senate seat,” one Republican strategist told me. To these Republican insiders, certain high-profile races in which G.O.P. candidates were already favored now look like potential blowouts—Kari Lake’s campaign for governor in Arizona, J. D. Vance’s for Senate in Ohio. And some races that seemed out of reach, such as the Senate campaign, in New Hampshire, of the election denier Don Bolduc, now look like possible wins. The word that kept coming up in these conversations was “bloodbath.”
My interest in talking with Republican consultants and pollsters, those with their hands in many races around the country, was not only to collect predictions but to hear the G.O.P.’s story of the election. (I let them speak anonymously, and spoke with some of their Democratic peers, too, in order to provide a check on their accounts.) I wanted to know what they thought earlier polls had missed, and how a race that had seemed like a tossup for much of the year could turn into a Republican rout.
One thing was obvious in these conversations: many of these professionals had spent much of the summer working to manage the abortion issue, which became the election’s chaotic element after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, in June. It supplied a burst of Democratic support and fury, but also changed polling in interesting ways. “What happened post-Dobbs was that progressives started picking up the phone at nineteen-nineties rates,” the Republican strategist told me. “Answering a political poll itself became a kind of expression of political identity.”
This Republican said that he and a colleague had examined polls in which they had access to individual voter data and concluded that as much as sixty per cent of Democratic poll respondents this summer were so-called super voters, those who vote in every single election, even though such voters normally compose about a third of the general electorate in each party. (He found no such effect among Republicans.) “This created an informational doom loop, where Democratic candidates get told, You should talk about January 6th, democracy being on the ballot, trans rights,’ ” he said, “because their primary super voters are picking up the phone and telling them this is what they care about.”
Still, crafting a winning response to the abortion issue was a fixation among Republicans. A pollster working in many races across the country said, “I had candidates who wanted to know the same thing, week after week, ‘How do we answer this abortion thing? They’re beating me up on it.’ ” The pollster went on, “And what they figured out is, we don’t have a good answer. It is what it is.”
In the end, Republicans didn’t find a way through the political fact that many of the voters they wanted to win were against them on abortion so much as wait it out. As a Democratic strategist pointed out to me, a flood of funding after the Supreme Court decision allowed Democratic campaigns to put ads on television “much, much earlier” in swing states. This created a unique situation, he went on, in which Democrats were disproportionately tuned in to politics, the Democratic base was overrepresented in polls, and swing voters were overwhelmingly seeing Democratic ads. “I think that’s what creates that blue mirage during the summer,” he said.
At the same time, the polls were likely underrepresenting certain segments of the electorate. In recent years, more educated voters, especially white women, have moved to the Democrats, and less educated ones, of all races and especially men, toward the Republicans. When it comes to polling, these shifts have created an imbalance, in which one of the most visible groups in politics, and one especially energized by the Dobbs decision, had shifted toward Democrats, and one of the least visible had shifted toward Republicans. “The fastest-moving portion of the electorate is Hispanic men, and the second-fastest-moving portion of the electorate is Black men,” the Republican consultant told me. You want to get them on the phone? “Good fucking luck.”
A Democratic pollster told me, “Arizona is, I think, like ground zero for that trend. I think you’re [also] seeing a lot of Hispanic drift toward Laxalt.” This Democrat also noted that Stacey Abrams, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Georgia, is underperforming among Black men, and thought that Abrams’s opponent, Republican Governor Brian Kemp, “is going to do a decent job winning Black voters compared to his 2018 performance.”
If Republicans couldn’t wait to get away from the major social issues, the Democrats continued to focus on them. Speaking about the defection of Hispanics to the G.O.P. in Nevada, the Republican strategist told me, “The reason that Democrats have fucked this up is that they won’t stop talking about abortion. And the reason that they screwed it up with Blacks is they won’t stop talking about abortion. . . . It’s like they’re a two-issue party. It’s this and Trump. They can’t stop. I don’t think they have anything else.”
The evolving Democratic coalition has made the party at once more prosperous and more progressive, a trick that long seemed difficult to pull off. But it has also exposed the party to certain vulnerabilities, especially among working-class voters. Across the country, Republicans have tended to emphasize a simple story about inflation—that the White House had been inattentive to its rise and its impact on ordinary Americans. As the Republican strategist put it to me, “Inflation is the big federal story, and a lot of blame belongs on the White House, because the White House just wished this would go away instead of saying, ‘We know it’s real, we know it’s a problem, it’s happening everywhere, we’re going to do everything to fix it but we can’t fix it immediately.’ ”
In certain politically competitive parts of the country, especially the booming Sun Belt states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, Republican governors could also make some policy gestures to back up the way they spoke about inflation. In July, Kemp, the governor of Georgia, extended a statewide gas-tax holiday. In August, he committed to spend two billion dollars in state-budget surplus on property-tax and income-tax rebates if reëlected. The next week, he said that $1.2 billion in federal COVID aid would be converted to three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar checks for low-income Georgians. In the closing statement of his final debate against Abrams, Kemp celebrated what he called the lowest unemployment rate and the most people ever working in the history of Georgia.
The gubernatorial campaigns of Ron DeSantis, in Florida, Greg Abbott, in Texas, and Kari Lake, in Arizona, have similarly emphasized this contrast—between the sunny G.O.P.-managed economy at home and the darkening, inflation-related clouds emanating from Joe Biden’s Washington. If voters felt economically stressed, Kemp said during his final debate, “the problem is, [wages are] not going up fast enough to keep up with Joe Biden’s inflation.”
It probably isn’t an accident that the next generation of MAGA stars has come from growing Southern states. As the Democratic pollster put it to me ruefully, “Being a governor of a Sun Belt state is awesome, because your economy is growing so fast, because you don’t have to raise taxes, and tax revenue just goes up, and then you get to do popular economic stuff.”
Republicans also moved to capitalize on the flailing economy with declarations—at campaign stops, in television ads, on right-wing media—that the country was descending into chaos. As the Democratic consultant Stanley Greenberg wrote this week, Democratic candidates “faced a barrage of ads on crime starting in September and early October, a barrage aided by Fox News dramatically increasing its crime reporting.” This offensive seems to have worked: when Greenberg asked voters what they most feared about Democratic control of Congress, their top pick was “crime and homelessness out of control in cities and police coming under attack,” which ran thirteen points ahead of concerns about illegal immigration.
Even if Democrats had wanted to make their own pivot to economic issues, their window to do so, by the early fall, was closing. The inflation index in September was much worse than it had been during the preceding months, and quite quickly it was difficult for Democrats to find much to brag about economically. By October, the basic daily experience of the race, for the Republican consultants I spoke with, had changed. “Post-Dobbs, Republicans stopped taking polls,” a Republican pollster told me. “In October, my sampling guys came back and told me, ‘Republicans are taking polls again. Response rates are through the roof.’ ”
By then, according to the insiders, Democrats were too trapped in issues—abortion and the threat to democracy—that appealed to their most devoted and best-educated supporters, and had not done enough to reassure voters that they were addressing material concerns. The Republican pollster, who has been regularly surveying Pennsylvania, told me that, when it came to the Democratic focus on abortion, “there just doesn’t seem to be any specificity. You’d want to do it with high-education, high-income supporters. It’s, like, no, they’re running on abortion constantly in, like, Scranton.”
Back in the summer, I’d spoken with the Republican strategist, who then predicted that the Dobbs wave would be ephemeral. “The Republican base is asking for very, very little,” he told me this week. “For all the stories we have about, like, the election deniers, from March of last year until now, their demands have basically been, like, ‘Please do something about the economy, please do something about immigration, please don’t let dudes participate in girls sports, and please do something about crime.’ ” When it came to independents, he went on, “It’s, like, ‘Please do something about inflation, please do something about crime, we’re pretty much with you on the girls-sports thing, just don’t be a dick about it.’ ”
He sounded a little gleeful. “It’s almost like we’ve fallen ass-backwards into the Contract with America,” he said, referring to the 1994 conservative agenda that fuelled the Republican takeover of Congress that year and elevated Newt Gingrich to House Speaker. “Certainly not because of any cunning or wit or foresight on our part. Let me assure you, it has not been because of the searing intellect of Republican leadership.”
Democrats were eager this week to point out how many seats the party in control of the White House typically loses in a midterm election—Barack Obama, the greatest politician the Party has produced in a generation, lost sixty-three seats in the House of Representatives in his first midterm. But many of the Republicans I spoke with saw this year as distinct. The pollster in Pennsylvania said that in 2010, “Obama got punished for overreach. That’s not this. This is incompetence.” When I asked the Republican consultant what the voters coming home to the G.O.P. in October wanted, he said, “Stop Biden. That’s it.”
Some elections are not complicated at all. As these Republican strategists saw it, their candidates did not get past unpopular positions on abortion with a tactical masterstroke, they simply absorbed the electoral hit and moved on. The economy is not good, and the President is both a Democrat and unpopular. If you looked only at those factors you might expect a result not unlike the Republican wave that these G.O.P. insiders have predicted. Maybe the race was simple enough that it could be sketched on a napkin.
“I can show you the trajectory of all our races,” the Republican pollster told me. “We took a benchmark in July—O.K., this is going to be harder than we thought. And it looks like a ‘V.’ We went straight down. And then once we finally got to October, we have enough money, the electorate becomes more fully engaged, and then the other side of the ‘V’ is straight back up. I can show you the same story in probably twenty-five races.” ♦
This article has been updated to clarify a quote by a Democratic pollster.
