Democrats’ problem is not focusing on issues most vital to independents, 2 prominent pollsters say

Joel Benenson has a feeling of deja vu watching President Biden’s agenda grind into a long, drawn-out negotiation as middle-of-the-road voters recoil at the process taking place in Congress.

“History doesn’t really often repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” said Benenson, who served as Barack Obama’s pollster in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

Benenson has teamed up with Neil Newhouse, a co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies, a GOP polling firm, on a research project warning that Democrats are heading into next year’s midterm elections amid echoes of Obama’s first two years in office that resulted in a resounding defeat in the 2010 midterms that cost the party its House majority.

So much political capital was spent on a nearly year-long effort to pass the Affordable Care Act that few voters rewarded Democrats when it finally became law in the spring of 2010, and, 12 years later, Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda has turned into another messy process fight.

At the heart of the Benenson-Newhouse research is something Democrats worried about a dozen years ago, when those messy negotiations took up so much bandwidth yet were also out of sync with what many swing voters prioritized. In late 2009 and early 2010, with unemployment hovering around 10 percent, key swing voters cared most about jobs and not expanding access to health insurance. Today’s voters appear to be most concerned about the ongoing global pandemic and are not deeply invested in the haggling over proposals such as expanding Medicare coverage to include dental, hearing and vision benefits.

“The conversation in Washington doesn’t match the conversation that’s happening around the country,” Newhouse said during a 45-minute telephone interview with Benenson.

The two pollsters squared off in 2008 and 2012, as Newhouse worked for John McCain and Mitt Romney, but now they do surveys together for Center Forward, a centrist think tank with ties to moderate Democrats and Republicans and establishment institutions in Washington.

It has become fashionable to talk about how few undecided voters exist in this polarized era, but both pollsters view this small bloc as the difference between a sweeping GOP victory and Democrats’ narrowly retaining their already narrow majority, especially after the 2018 and 2020 elections realigned centrist suburban voters solidly into the Democratic coalition.

Benenson gives Biden huge credit for winning independents by a net gain of 12 percentage points more than Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Now they are turning away from Biden and his agenda: 70 percent of independent voters said the country was headed in the wrong direction, according to the seven-page memo the pollsters wrote for Center Forward....(Read more)

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