They call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday is just as bad, for President Dennison and the Republicans.
At a recent rally, the Mouth that Roared said that he is more popular than President Obama.
He is not.
Trump claimed to be more popular than Obama — he’s wrong
Citing a Rasmussen poll “and others,” Trump falsely said his numbers were higher than Obama’s
Polling data shows that between the dates Feb. 26, and March 8, Trump's average approval rating was 40.9 percent, according to RealClearPolitics. The most recent Rasmussen poll only had the president's approval rating at 44 percent, which differed from his claim that it was "around 50%."
The poisonous unpopularity of the Trump brand is killing the Republican party.
The Tuesday special election, between Rick Saccone, the Republican candidate that Trump says is weak and Democratic candidate Conor Lamb--in a Pennsylvania district that Trump won by 20 points and Romney won by 17 points--should not even be close.
And yet.
The two candidates are essentially tied in the average of the polls (although, for what it’s worth, Monmouth, the only FiveThirtyEight gold-standard pollster6 to look at the race, has Saccone ahead by 3 points.
Even if Lamb loses, it points to bad news for the Republican party as a harbinger for a Big Blue Wave, cleaning out Congress during the November midterms.
There's ample reason to think that Pennsylvania 18 is more of an indicator of the results in November than not. A close race there would be right in line with what other special elections have been showing so far. In the average federal special election this cycle, Democrats have been outperforming their baseline based off the prior two presidential elections by 16 percentage points.
A 16-point swing in federal elections lines up with a very good year for the Democrats in the House vote come the fall.To match that 16 point average, Lamb needs only to come within 5 points of Saccone on Tuesday.A close Pennsylvania 18 result would also be another datapoint to demonstrate that Republicans are losing the most ground in some of Trump's strongest areas.