The numbers are rising, and unlike most things the media touches lately, the numbers aren’t going their way.
Democrats are losing the Supreme Court messaging war, new polling indicates, with support for Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation trending in the GOP’s direction.
Nearly half (46 percent) of voters in an Oct. 2-4 Morning Consult/Politico poll said the Senate should confirm Barrett — up 9 percentage points since President Donald Trump announced her nomination on Sept. 26 — as more voters say the chamber should consider her elevation to the high court as soon as possible, regardless of who wins next month’s election.
Specifically, more voters, and more independents want her confirmed than oppose her confirmation. Even a quarter of Democrats support her confirmation.
So what’s going on here?
1. The Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, haven’t made much of a case against Barrett. They were going to go all in on ObamaCare, but then swerved right back around to the Catholic attacks.
Mixed messaging is never a good way to rally anyone behind anything. (Something the GOP ought to remember one of these days.)
Their only real argument is that confirming her is unfair and hypocritical. And while a chunk of the general public may accept that argument, they don’t care. It’s D.C. inside baseball.
Expect the Democrats to circle back to ObamaCare and to depicting Barrett as a wicked witch who will side with corporations. Except that the attack doesn’t click with its target.
2. There’s too much stuff.
Between the pandemic, Trump’s diagnosis and the Black Lives Matter riots, the zone has been so flooded that it can’t hold any more water. Rallying the mob over a Supreme Court justice without having a clear and compelling argument (e.g. he’s a rapist) isn’t working.
There’s also a prompt here for Trump and the GOP.
The scandal system is so overloaded that even a lot of Democrats are tired and have trouble keeping up and want the craziness to stop. The media ricochets from a post office conspiracy to a Trump diagnosis conspiracy and there’s only so much room for new narratives and new things to be angry about. This means that there’s a lot that the GOP can move on doing because the zone is too flooded to accomodate all the outraged narratives.
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