House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is not doing Republicans any favors by insisting the party’s midterm chances look good, conservative columnist Matt Lewis argued in a column for the Washington Sun.
Lewis wrote that Johnson is either trying to keep spirits up or living in an “alternative reality.” He drew a parallel to 2012, when many conservatives went into Election Day believing Mitt Romney would defeat President Barack Obama.
While many Republicans seem to have “grudgingly accepted the likelihood of a blue wave,” Lewis noted, some prominent voices are loudly proclaiming the opposite. In a speech in North Carolina last week, per Lewis, Johnson declared, “The polls are wrong.” Pollsters, Johnson said, “are admitting over the last few weeks that they have been under-sampling Republicans [and] they are over-sampling Democrats … because Republicans don’t trust pollsters anymore.”
Johnson made similar remarks at an Oct. 13 event in Corpus Christi, Texas, where he said, “They are under-sampling [Republicans].” He also told the crowd, “It feels like 2024.”
Lewis wrote that the problem is not that Johnson raised the possibility of polling error. “The problem is that Johnson is unequivocally stating that ‘the polls are wrong’ — an assertion he cannot factually know to be true,” he wrote.
Economic indicators, early voting and voter registration numbers also suggest Nov. 3 will not be a happy day for Republicans, Lewis wrote, adding that he can’t imagine Donald Trump would be campaigning in states like Kansas and Alaska if he believed those polls were wrong.
Lewis offered a possible motive. “Nobody wants a football coach who, with two minutes left in the game, tells his team, ‘Let’s face it, guys, we’re cooked,’” he wrote. Maybe, he suggested, Johnson believes optimism will push Republican voters to turn out.
But intent, Lewis argued, matters less than consequences in a country where trust in elections is “teetering.” He wrote that the shock of losing in 2012 after being assured Romney was on the cusp of victory contributed to the “GOP’s spiral,” and he linked it to election denial in 2020 and the Jan. 6 insurrection.
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