It’s a tale of two political stories. One's filled with a record economy, jobs, wages, and opportunity. The other with a failed impeachment effort and a battle between socialism and socialist-lite for presidential party supremacy. My first related story compared the turnout results for Obama and Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire under like circumstances and we saw Trump’s turnout was 143% higher in states that on balance are more favorable to Democrats politically. That was the first sign with actual votes being cast in 2020. Another potential tells for a coming red wave. It’s not just that President Trump has maintained his best approval rating for the second consecutive month, his net approval rating is positive for the first time in the survey and what lies beneath is even more telling. What people are saying about themselves hasn’t happened in many years.
Gallup’s monthly survey samples how people identify politically. Not only do Republican identifiers now top Democrats by 32% to 27%. That’s the highest percentage of self-ID'd Republicans since 2014. That's a five-point advantage over Democrats and it's the biggest since 2005. Yes, fifteen years. To put those two years in perspective, the last time this many people ID’d as Republicans, they went on to win the 2014 midterm elections. The last time they had an ID advantage this large, they had just come off of sweeping the 2004 elections making gains in Congress and re-electing President Bush.
This is how data begins to come together to begin to paint a picture of something bigger in the making.
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