Biden Not Paying Enough Attention to Most Important Issues

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More Americans are struggling economically than felt that way at the prior midterm elections four years ago. Most say President Joe Biden has not been paying attention to their most important concerns as inflation continues to be the top issue in this cycle, according to the latest national Monmouth University Poll. Republicans continue to hold a slight edge in preference for congressional control.

Republicans maintain a slight edge in preference for party control of Congress. Currently, 40% of Americans say they want the GOP in charge and another 9% have no initial preference but lean toward Republican control. Democratic control is preferred by 35% with another 10% leaning toward the Democrats. CONTINUED

Monmouth University Polling Institute

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GOP holds big leads on key economic issues ahead of the November elections, CNBC survey shows

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The third-quarter CNBC All-America Economic Survey finds some modest improvements in economic attitudes and in President Joe Biden’s approval ratings across the country, but Americans still harbor mostly negative views on the economy and give the GOP double-digit leads on key economic and financial issues ahead of the November elections.

Biden’s overall approval rating improved 10 points from the July survey with 46% approving and 50% disapproving. Approval of Biden’s handling of the economy also rose 10 points, with 40% approving and 56% disapproving. While they were the president’s best numbers since 2021, the improvement came largely from increased Democratic support. CONTINUED

Steve Liesman, CNBC

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Who will decide this election?

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I know exactly how to get you to stop reading right now: We’re going to do a little arithmetic!

It’s simple, so I hope you’ll bear with me.

Each cycle, pollsters and pundits alike seem to derive great pleasure from anointing some segment of the electorate as the decider of the outcome. For months, perhaps years, we’ll be hearing that some group of voters decided this election.

I’m here to suggest that such an approach is often meaningless and incoherent, masking several different questions. CONTINUED

Mark Mellman (Mellman Group), The Hill

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How the Diploma Divide Is Remaking American Politics

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… John F. Kennedy lost college-educated voters by a two-to-one margin yet won the presidency thanks to overwhelming support among white voters without a degree. Sixty years later, our second Catholic president charted a much different path to the White House, losing non-college-educated whites by a two-to-one margin while securing 60 percent of the college-educated vote. …

In political-science parlance, the collapse of the New Deal–era alignment — in which voters’ income levels strongly predicted their partisan preference — is often referred to as “class dealignment.” The increasing tendency for politics to divide voters along educational lines, meanwhile, is known as “education polarization.” …

In my view, education polarization cannot be understood without a recognition of the values divide between educated professionals and working people in the aggregate. That divide is rooted in each class’s disparate ways of life, economic imperatives, socialization experiences, and levels of material security. By itself, the emergence of this gap might not have been sufficient to trigger class dealignment, but its adverse political implications have been greatly exacerbated by the past half-century of inequitable growth, civic decline, and media fragmentation. CONTINUED

Eric Levitz, New York Magazine

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Has Polling Broken Politics?

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… On today’s episode, Jane Coaston brings together two experts to diagnose what we’re getting wrong in both how we conduct polls, and how we interpret the data they give us. Margie Omero is a principal at the Democratic polling firm GBAO. Nate Silver, who prefers to call himself a “forecaster” rather than a pollster, is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. Together, the two tackle how polling both reflects and affects the national political mood, and whether our appetite for election predictions is doing democracy more harm than good. CONTINUED

The Argument, New York Times

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The 2022 election influencers

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To really understand an election, you have to understand the motivations — and the lives — of the Americans voting in it. But too often our politics misses the point, and just describes people as demographic groups or party labels. We can do better.

We’ve got the data for it: tens of thousands of interviews in our CBS News polling over the year where people have expressed themselves and how they see politics.

Here’s what we learned from it all: the groups who are the influencers of 2022, whose ideas and choices are steering the conversation now and likely deciding the midterms next month. CONTINUED

Anthony Salvanto & Jennifer De Pinto, CBS News

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