It took a while, but after the Dobbs decision, Democrats overtook Republicans in the RealClearPolitics average for the 2022 generic ballot. For sure, Democrats felt that the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade was the political lifeline they needed to stave off a red wave in November.
But their lead in the generic ballot was small and, as expected, didn’t last long. Democrats had erased the GOP edge and managed to gain a 0.2-point lead in the generic ballot. But in the past ten days, the RCP average has swung back in favor of the Republicans, who now lead by 0.4 points.
It’s not a statistically impressive lead and is much smaller than the advantage held by Republicans earlier this year. But it’s a 0.6-point swing in the GOP’s favor in less than two weeks, which suggests that the Dobbs effect on polling has started to wane. This means that the economic issues that were benefiting Republicans are reclaiming their importance among likely midterm voters, and the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago has remotivated them as well.
If the Dobbs effect is starting to wane, when can we anticipate the generic ballot polling to reflect the impact that the raid had? When the Supreme Court ruling was released, the RealClearPolitics generic ballot average showed the Republican Party with a lead of +3.4 points; that really started to tighten about a month later. So it could take a month, but Robert Cahaly, the founder and head pollster of the Trafalgar Group, thinks we’ll see the impact a lot quicker.
Source: PJ Media
