Independent voters don’t want mini-Trumps, are bored by Biden

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A critical group of swing voters was asked to give a brief, one-word description of the emotions they feel upon seeing President Biden. The answers were bleak: “Indifferent … mixed to indifferent … bored … ambivalent … frustrated … flabbergasted … lost.”

Then the same voters, who had cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, were asked for a show of hands for those who would support the former president in a rematch vs. the sitting president.

“None of you,” Rich Thau, president of market research company Engagious, said to his focus group Tuesday night in Pennsylvania. It’s the same thread Thau has seen in focus groups all year. CONTINUED

Paul Kane, Washington Post

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Iowa Poll: Chuck Grassley narrowly leads Mike Franken in US Senate race

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Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley’s lead over Democrat Mike Franken has narrowed to 3 percentage points with less than a month until Election Day, signaling Grassley’s toughest reelection fight in 40 years.

A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Grassley leads with 46% of the vote to Franken’s 43% among likely voters. Another 4% would vote for someone else, 4% would not vote and 3% are not sure. CONTINUED

Stephen Gruber-Miller & Brianne Pfannenstiel, Des Moines Register

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Will America’s Most Pilloried Pollster Get It Right Again?

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In 2016, the first year of its existence, the Trafalgar Group was one of the few polling outfits to predict that Donald Trump would beat Hillary Clinton. In 2020, Trafalgar incorrectly predicted another Trump win but accurately depicted the race as neck and neck in places like Wisconsin, where many pollsters again drastically underestimated Trump’s support. Although Trafalgar has missed the mark widely on its share of races over the years — usually overestimating Republican chances — it has become an object of fascination for its seeming ability to capture a segment of the population that has eluded other surveyors. But because of the company’s opaque methods and predictably GOP-leaning results, Trafalgar is also a frequent target of criticism for more mainstream pollsters. I spoke with Trafalgar founder Robert Cahaly about what makes his polls different, why he’s not more transparent about his methods, and how he thinks the midterms will shake out. CONTINUED

Benjamin Hart, New York Magazine

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Democrats’ lead with Hispanic voters is smaller than in 2018, Post-Ipsos poll finds

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Hispanic voters favor Democrats in November’s congressional elections, but by a smaller margin than four years ago, with inflation concerns and President Biden’s middling approval ratings helping Republicans hold onto gains made in 2020, a Washington Post-Ipsos poll finds.

Hispanic and Latino voters rank rising prices as the most important issue in their midterm vote and are split nearly evenly between trusting Democrats and Republicans to address the issue, with more than 1 in 3 trusting neither party. Democrats lead on most other issues and hold a 28 percentage-point advantage on trust to handle abortion, which Hispanic voters rank as second-most important in their vote.

Overall, the Post-Ipsos poll finds 63 percent of Hispanic registered voters would support Democrats for Congress if the election were held today, while 36 percent support Republicans. CONTINUED

Scott Clement, Emily Guskin, Amy B Wang & Sabrina Rodriguez, Washington Post

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Why Politics Has Become So Stressful

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No matter which party wins control of the House and Senate next month, the results are virtually certain to reinforce the paradox powering the nation’s steadily mounting political tension.

American politics today may be both more rigid and more unstable than at any other time since at least the Civil War. A politics that is rigid and unstable sounds like a contradiction in terms. But the system’s instability is a direct result of its rigidity. Because so many voters—and so many states—are reliably locked down for one side or the other, even the slightest shifts among the few voters and few states that are truly up for grabs can tilt the balance of power. The consequence is a politics in which neither party can sustain a durable advantage over the other, and political direction for a country of 330 million people is decided by a tiny sliver of voters in about half a dozen states—maybe a few hundred thousand people in all.

These twin forces largely explain why so many Americans now find politics so stressful. People across the country nervously parse the choices of distant voters in a handful of states to see which party will control the federal government. The balance always remains so wobbly that a momentary mood swing in just a few subdivisions outside Atlanta, Phoenix, or Philadelphia can determine whether Democrats are empowered to pass a new law codifying a national right to abortion, or Republicans are positioned to impose a national ban. Everything is always at stake—and nothing seems to break the deadlock. CONTINUED

Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic

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Eight in 10 Americans Favor Early Voting, Photo ID Laws

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With the midterm elections less than a month away, large majorities of Americans favor three measures meant to make voting easier: early voting (78% in favor), automatic voter registration (65%) and sending absentee ballots to all eligible voters (60%).

Majorities of Americans also oppose two measures that could make voting harder: removing inactive voters from voter lists (60%) and limiting the number of drop boxes for absentee ballots (59%). One restrictive policy that most Americans (79%) are on board with, however, is requiring photo identification to vote. CONTINUED

Nicole Willcoxon & Lydia Saad, Gallup

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