A Little Good News?

 

"Troll och Yngling" (Trolls and Youth), by the Swedish artist Einar Bager (1887–1990), via Malmö Museer.

This thing Tuesday from Shane Goldmacher/NYTimes seems to have flown in under the radar, but I think it's interesting:

Small-dollar donations typically increase as an election nears. But just the opposite has happened in recent months across a wide range of Republican entities, including every major party committee and former President Donald J. Trump’s political operation.

The total amount donated online fell by more than 12 percent across all federal Republican campaigns and committees in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, according to an analysis of federal records from WinRed, the main online Republican donation-processing portal.

More alarming for Republicans: Democratic contributions surged at the same time. Total federal donations on ActBlue, the Democratic counterpart, jumped by more than 21 percent.

A question popped into my head when I was reading this, a perfectly formed little hypothesis: Are horserace polls a lagging indicator (i.e., an indicator where the information you're interested in takes a long time to show up)? At this stage of the 2022 campaign (which doesn't really begin until Labor Day, the cliché tells us, as voters are thinking about things other than politics during the summer, including no doubt the price of gas, but that's a lagging indicator in its own right, with concern continuing to rise even as the price has been falling over the last several weeks), do we learn more about what's going on in the hive mind from other indicators, like those small-dollar donations? Can common-folk donors serve as a kind of party advance guard, signaling how the party as a whole is moving? Are Democrats getting more excited and Republicans more discouraged than they themselves realize?

I'll bet, for one thing, people on ActBlue and its Republican knockoff (why do Republicans always create imitations of Democratic institutions, right down to copying the names, and why do Times copy editors allow a sequence that makes it look the other way around?) are paying more attention to the Select Committee hearings than the average voter, or that they're more aware of ongoing anti-inflation efforts before they've borne any fruit (assuming they will eventually). Won't these things get clearer to everybody in September?

Quick Google of "polls are a lagging indicator" yields this, from the spring of 2020:

I've been saying this endlessly, but polls are going to be a lagging indicator of reality here. And the reality is bad, and getting worse. https://t.co/tdHkPbbD0i

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) April 9, 2020

I think Ezra meant "bad" in the sense of "bad for Trump", which it certainly was, though only pundits (and of course Trump himself) thought that was literally the most important thing about the pandemic.

Here's a much more directly relevant one, from a couple of months ago this year:

Generic ballot is a lagging indicator. Wait for the LV polls as we get to September.

— Geoffrey Skelley (@geoffreyvs) June 4, 2022

In fact we didn't need to wait till September to see the formation of a trend, in the opposite direction from the one Skelley was expecting, as reported this morning:

The USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll shows that 44 percent of respondents would vote for the Democratic candidate if the election for Congress were held today, compared to 40 percent who said they would back the Republican. Roughly 16 percent said they were undecided.

The polling indicates movement for Democrats since last month, when voters were split 40 percent for each party, respectively, when asked the same question.

Speaking of Trump (when are we ever not speaking of him, any more?), the Goldmacher piece goes on to say, he's so focused on punishing his Republican enemies that he's in practice working for the Democrats:

Exacerbating the fund-raising problems for Republicans is that Mr. Trump continues to be the party’s dominant fund-raiser and yet virtually none of the tens of millions of dollars he has raised has gone toward defeating Democrats. Instead, the money has funded his political team and retribution agenda against Republicans who have crossed him.

Republicans, as I was trying to suggest earlier in the month, are far less unified than they'd like you to think: maybe not so much on ideological questions as personal ones. The years of strenuous effort to march together in lockstep as one behind the idiotic figure of Trump have been rough on feelings, and Trump's own remarkable selfishness and disloyalty make it rougher. Few of them are willing to attack Trump himself directly—they'd rather do contortions like Pence (see Steve's post today)—but they're increasingly willing to quarrel with one another, in startlingly bitter primary contests, which Trump eggs on gleefully. The mutual resentment and acrimony of Republicans in states where Trump has been preventing them from ironing out their differences in a normal way—especially Georgia and Arizona and Pennsylvania—is going to lower Republican turnout in November, and could lower it significantly.

Democrats' job should be to divide and conquer, which could entail some distasteful flattery of the Cheneys and Kinzingers, but also a lot more enjoyable counter-trolling.