Buck’s Midterm Goal: 50 Seats for the GOP

CLAY: This trip over to Poland and to Europe for Joe Biden that ended disastrously when he seemed to suggest that America was demanding that Vladimir Putin be removed from office, it was all about trying to build him up. As you pointed out, Buck, he’s at 40% approval in the NBC News poll. And one of the things we’ve talked about a lot on this program is, “Well, things are so bad for Joe Biden right now, what is likely to happen by the time we get to the midterms, which obviously are in early November? So as we get to April we’re talking about six months away, effectively.

I read this over the weekend. I thought it was fantastic. Democrats are, of course, hoping that Joe Biden can reverse his negative approval ratings, and we should mention that the polls tend to be widely biased in favor of Democratic politicians. So if Joe Biden is at 40% in an NBC News poll, if there is continuing to be bias there — as there has been in the ’16 election and in the ’20 election — in favor of Biden, how much lower might his approval ratings actually be? Just worth thinking about.

So Nathan Gonzales, who is an elections analyst, looked into the last seven decades, Buck, of midterm election years to try to find out how much have president approval ratings gotten better during a midterm election year? And here what he found. “Looking back more than 70 years,” and I’m reading this from the Wall Street Journal, “there hasn’t been a single president who substantially improved his job approval rating from late January/early February of a midterm election year to late October/early November…

“More specifically, in the last 18 midterm elections,” this is Gonzales’s work, “going back to Harry Truman in 1950, the average president’s job approval rating dropped 8 points between this time of year and Election Day.” That’s pretty wild to think about, Buck, because maybe there can be a changing of the historical trajectory over the last 70 years, but what it suggests, Buck, is when the American public makes a decision about you, they’ve got 17 or 18 months of data by the time get into the midterm election year to be able to analyze exactly what’s going on.

It’s really hard to get them to change their mind. So if Biden’s gonna happen fall another eight points, we’re not just talking about a bad election season, Buck; we’re talking about a cataclysm, potentially, for the Democratic Party, worse than ’94, maybe worse than 2010 both.

BUCK: And if we don’t achieve it, we have underperformed. That’s what we… We have to set the bar as high as is possible here because we could have been facing… Let’s be honest. We could have been facing… Now, when I say “could have,” people say, “No, Buck, their decisions are terrible.” I’m just saying maybe something had really gone their way; maybe there had been some economic cycle that Biden would benefit from like ending the pandemic and all of the economic prosperity that you would think would come along with that.

We could have been in position where they were trying to say, “Biden has delivered and look at all the great stuff he’s done.” Instead, it’s just so many disasters that we have to make sure we ram home victory here or else it’ll be underperforming, underperforming. That’s the way we —

CLAY: So what’s your number? What’s your over-under basically six months out for the House. The Senate’s tougher because they’re relatively few seats and it’s gonna swing —

BUCK: I want 50 seats in the House.

CLAY: Fifty seats.

BUCK: I want 50. Yep. I want 50. I think that’s a pretty solid number. That would be a good day.

CLAY: Yeah.