Polls in One Place.

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1. The partisan identification of registered voters is now evenly split between the two major parties: 49% of registered voters are Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, and a nearly identical share – 48% – are Republicans or lean to the Republican Party. The partisan balance has tightened in recent years following a clear edge in Democratic Party affiliation during the last administration. Four years ago, in the run-up to the 2020 election, Democrats had a 5 percentage point advantage over the GOP (51% vs. 46%). (Source: pewresearch.org)

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2. Dan Balz, Washington Post:

Imagine you are planning to run a few miles on a treadmill as part of your regular workout. You can do this with the treadmill in a level position, or you can set it at an incline. It isn’t hard to determine which would make for an easier session at the gym.

That’s the way that Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster, described what he sees as the significance of data that shows Republicans now at parity with Democrats on party identification. “This is the under recognized game changer for 2024,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter, a few days ago. “Republicans competing on a level playing field.”

The data that McInturff was citing comes from surveys for NBC News that his firm, Public Opinion Strategies, has done jointly with the Democratic firm Hart Research Associates for many years. The slide he posted showed that, among registered voters, 41 percent now identify as Republicans, 40 percent as Democrats. In 2016, Democrats had an advantage of seven percentage points. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

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3. The Wall Street Journal:

Republicans right now think inflation is a much bigger problem than Democrats do, and a lot of that is just politics. But here’s another possibility: Many of the places Republicans live indeed have had significantly higher inflation than Democratic enclaves.

In new research, economists Carola Binder, Rupal Kamdar and Jane Ryngaert examined Labor Department inflation figures for U.S. metropolitan areas, and compared them with voting data. Their finding: Metro areas with more Republicans and independent voters tended to have higher inflation in 2022 than places where Democrats live.

A Wall Street Journal analysis found a similar pattern at the state level. Inflation estimates provided by Moody’s Analytics, combined with voting data, show that states where Donald Trump garnered the most votes in 2020 have on balance experienced higher inflation. (Source: wsj.com, conference.nber.org)

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4. In the seven swing states combined, Trump leads Biden in a head-to-head matchup 47% to 44%. In a five-way ballot test that includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and independent Cornel West, Trump opened a larger lead: 43% to 38% for Biden and 8% for Kennedy Jr. When looking at the individual states, Trump leads Biden in all but Wisconsin, where the two candidates are tied at 45% each. Trump’s leads in North Carolina (+7) and Nevada (+9) are the most robust. His leads in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania are much narrower, between one and three points. In 2020, Biden won every one of these states except North Carolina. Many Democrats wonder why Biden isn’t getting more credit for an economy where unemployment is at record lows, the stock market is booming, and the post-COVID economic hangover has lifted. But those aren’t the measuring sticks that voters use to gauge the health of the economy. When asked what they thought the best markers of a strong economy were, few (6%) picked the stock market, only 13% picked low unemployment, and just 9% chose household income. Instead, a healthy majority (54%) said the cost of living was the best way to measure the strength of the economy. And, not surprisingly, 51% of voters also think that inflation is the “worst/weakest” part of the economy. In other words, in the minds of voters, inflation is the engine — not the caboose — of the economy. (Source: cookpolitical.com/survey-research)

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