Beyond approval numbers: GOP’s midterm prospects aren’t a sure thing

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One of the most reliable rules of American politics is that a president’s first-term midterm elections are bad for the president’s party. Since 1950, the president’s party has gained seats in the first midterm only once, in 2002, the first national election after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. …

Midterms are supposed to be referenda, a measure of whether voters are happy with the people in power. But right now, Biden and Trump and 2020 all loom over the year’s midterms. It may be that some voters see this midterm not as a referendum but as a choice between two not very palatable alternatives.

Add in a complicated issue environment and newly drawn congressional district lines and you have a recipe for a November that right now looks confusing and harder than usual to predict. CONTINUED

Dante Chinni, NBC News

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Concern about abortion explodes among Democrats, fueling a push to vote

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Concern about abortion access exploded among Democratic voters as an election issue over the past month, a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found, as the repercussions of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade reverberate.

Sixty-four percent of Democrats say the court’s action makes them more likely to vote in November, potentially a crucial factor in midterm elections that traditionally have low turnout. That’s more than double the 29% of Democrats who expressed that view in a USA TODAY/Suffolk survey taken in June after a draft of the landmark decision was leaked. CONTINUED

Susan Page, Chelsey Cox, Ella Lee & Katherine Swartz, USA Today

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Republicans lead race for House control at start of 2022 campaign — CBS News Battleground Tracker

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The CBS News Battleground Tracker model finds Republicans start the 2022 campaign with a lead in the race for the House, with 230 seats to 205 seats for Democrats. The party with 218 seats controls the House.

Control of Congress is won and lost in districts, of course, so to bring you this estimate we’ve surveyed tens of thousands of voters across them all, and connected their current preferences to the 2020 Census, district data and millions of voter records to estimate seat counts. That makes it a picture of things today, not a forecast; it’s July, not November. CONTINUED

CBS News

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Midterm Misery for Biden as Key Economy Gauge Flags 30-Seat Loss

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Whatever else is on Americans’ minds — and that’s a long list right now — the state of the economy looms large in any US election. That spells big trouble for Democrats in November’s midterm vote.

A new study by Bloomberg Economics takes one gauge with a knack of predicting ballot outcomes — the misery index, calculated by adding up the inflation and unemployment rates — and projects it forward through election day.

The result: Based on past voting patterns, President Joe Biden’s party can expect to lose 30 to 40 seats in the House and a few in the Senate too, easily wiping out razor-thin Democratic majorities. CONTINUED

Andrew Husby, Gregory Korte, Steven T. Dennis & Eric Fan, Bloomberg

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1 in 5 Americans Fear Getting Monkeypox but Many Know Little About It

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As Covid-19 cases surge across the United States dominated by a highly transmissible subvariant and worry about Covid persists, some in the public have begun to voice concern about the new health threat of monkeypox, according to a new Annenberg Public Policy Center national survey.

While 1 in 3 Americans worry about getting Covid-19 in the next three months, according to the July survey, nearly 1 in 5 are concerned about contracting monkeypox, a disease endemic in parts of Africa whose spread to 75 countries across the globe led the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a global health emergency on July 23, days after the survey was completed. CONTINUED

Annenberg Public Policy Center

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Americans dismayed at end of Roe are less certain they will vote, poll finds

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Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the end of Roe v. Wade represents a “major loss of rights” for women, a Washington Post-Schar School poll finds, but those who support abortion access are less certain they will vote this fall — a sign of the challenges facing Democrats who hope the issue will motivate their base in the midterms.

Fully 58 percent of the country supports a federal law establishing the right to an abortion before a fetus can survive outside the womb, the standard the Supreme Court enshrined for nearly 50 years and overturned last month. CONTINUED

Hannah Knowles, Emily Guskin & Scott Clement, Washington Post

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