interesting read. good evening, thank you for coming in, sir. politics is increasingly polarized within the parties themselves. what do you see when you look at the political landscape right now, james? as one of the senior members on the commenting crew over the years, ifr seen a number of midterm elections before. what i actually notice is how much this resembles other big wave elections we ve seen before. would you like me to list some of them? sure. i have four in mind. one is 1974 when richard nixon resigned, was the so-called watergate baby s election where they had huge gains in the senate and the house and people on the landscape, like gary hart and patrick leahy, they made their way into the senate. that was a big wave election. in 94, in bill clinton s term, you had a sort of you had the
context of other big wave election where the minority power swept into the house. our conclusion that is looking good for democrats. looking at a handful of these numbers, presidential approval rating and congressional approval ratings and a break down between oeeach of the parties. matches up when other parties swept in control of the house in 2006 and 2010 when republicans and, democrats and republicans respectively conquered the house. november is looking pretty good for house democrats. so, to that point, how are you guys able to explain that? any data points explain this trend? democrats have a clear, political vision that people rally about getting excited about or is this a problem with the republican platform from the president on down that is alienating people and triggering this potential blue wave? people not happy with the president. people not happy with the party in power and people not happy
trends, but if you look at that indicator, and also just the strong economic indicators in general, usually when you would see those numbers, you would not expect a big wave election. what you might see, if republicans lose the house, maybe it won t be a wave they ll be losing by a narrow margin, or maybe they can hold on. most people still don t expect that to happen. the president was at about 44% on inauguration day now in the low 40s. unemployment is below 4, stock market is up about 21% 22% since hi took office. i think that s why even with so many controversies, he s maintained that level of popularity. gloria, go ahead. the thing i look at is if 57% of the people think we re on the right track, why is the president s approval/disapproval upsidedown? the president, for better or worse, gets credit or doesn t
in general they have a strong message on the economy. but almost every time they feel like they re getting legislative achievements there s another distraction and controversy. even the house republicans were supportive of the memo coming out, there is a wish that we could just get back to the economy. looks like this will dominate the day again. the stock market sold off on friday. let me get to the issue of momentum. were gonna put up poll numbers on the generic ballot for congress. we talked about it earlier, it was really negative for republicans and still is. today it s republicans at 39 and democrats 46. the dems are plus seven. from the first of the year it was in the double digits. so that has tighten some to. this a big wave election i wonder if everybody still talking about it.
with complete control of the house and the senate for these past two years, we can now say it has not gone well. let s start just for perspective with after world war ii. this is all the congresses, all the sessions of congress that have happened since 1947. those blue lines show the number of bills that each congress was able to pass. the last line with the arrow pointing to it, that is the congress that comes to an end today. you will notice that congress over the last few years has been a little stunted, is probably the polite way to put it, since the republicans took over the house in their big wave election in 2010. look at that, the three congresses since then, the 114th congress just ended today, those three are the least productive congresses of all time. since the republicans took control of the house in 2010, the three congresses since then