Gina Hinojosa sends me a couple of emails a day, and this was in one of her latest:
Josh Marshall also found a positive poll in the Florida Senate race:
I want to flag this poll for you. It’s a poll of the Florida Senate race by St. Pete Polls, a mid-tier regional pollster. It shows appointed incumbent Senator Ashley Moody (R) and Democratic nominee Angie Nixon tied at roughly 45% of the vote. There’s not much polling of this race. There are two other recent polls, one by Change Research a respected but generally Democratic-aligned pollster, and another from Quantus Insights, a GOP-aligned pollster with an iffy reputation. Change Research had a tied race a week ago. Quantus had Moody up by eight points a bit less than a week ago.
As Josh says in his piece, he’s by no means saying that Nixon is going to win, but that Republicans are going to have to spend money in Florida to drag a mediocre candidate across the line at worst, and, hey, with the issues in the Hispanic community that Joe highlighted yesterday via an ad from GOP Rep Salazar, who knows?
For both of these races, I’m not going to discount the possibility of a win that’s powered by the horrible situation with gas prices, Trump’s obvious indifference to the suffering of MAGA, and the tendency of true believer MAGAts to stay home when their own personal Jesus isn’t on the ballot.
As a realist, I have to emphasize that Ihese polls where the Democratic challenger isn’t some comfortable margin over 50% in a red state are probably subject to the increasing difficulty of modeling likely voters, the tendency of MAGA to avoid polling, the enthusiasm of Democrats who love to answer pollsters, and all the other things that have made polling unreliable for the last few cycles.
That all said, we’re on the edge of a panic. Social media is already showing some gas stations out of diesel, and these stations are in Texas and Florida. Nothing the Trump Administration is doing will address these shortages — his actions will only make them worse.
As we move toward the last 6 weeks of the race, we’re seeing Republican Congressional candidates dodge debates in districts Democrats could win (that link is for Gabe Hurd in CO-3, which is R+5). Trump is deep in his bunker, showing how out of touch he his:
This is easily the most volatile political environment I’ve seen in my lifetime. It’s going to be an ugly few weeks for Republicans, and I’m guessing that Salazar in Florida is certainly not the last Republican who’s going to panic and try to wash the Trump stink off of their campaign.
