Mayors need to understand the problem

I don’t really want to spin this out into a huge take, but I do want to flag something that I noticed while scrolling through Nate Silver’s polling averages on February 25:

• Donald Trump’s net approval rating was -14.1, just a tiny bit better than the -14.5 he scored at the same point in his first term.

• Democrats were up 5.4 points on the generic congressional ballot, which is quite a bit worse than the eight points they were up at this point in 2018.

This might be very consequential. Looking at the states that are key to winning the Senate, Silver’s methodology estimates a generic ballot of R+5 in Iowa and Florida, R+5.3 in Texas, R+5.5 in Ohio, and R+8.3 in Alaska.

I would not take any of those figures to the bank as Senate projections — nobody thinks Democrats have a better shot in Florida than Alaska — but they’re illustrative of the fact that it would not be surprising to see Republicans sweep those races. It’s just really hard for even a totally solid candidate running a totally solid race to run five or six points ahead of the partisan fundamentals. If Democrats were doing as well as they were in 2018, you’d be asking the Dem Senate candidates to run two or three points ahead of the fundamentals. That’s a lot more doable.

So why are Democrats polling worse than they were in 2018?

It’s not because Trump is polling better. Anyone who reads Slow Boring can probably guess what I think the takeaway should be, but I don’t want to start any arguments so much as to platform the observation. Trump’s approval is basically tracking where it was eight years ago, but Democrats in Congress are doing worse.

Patrick Spence: I’m a DC voter who doesn’t want to vote for Janeese Lewis George for fairly obvious reasons, but is genuinely concerned Kenyan McDuffie is a downgrade from Bowser and his responses to the Greater Greater Washington questionnaire don’t make me feel reassured. Is there a case for voting for McDuffie over JLG? What about a case for genuine optimism about what a McDuffie mayoralty looks like?

Michael W: Do you have any thoughts about GGWash’s endorsement of Janeese Lewis George and saying