For more than 40 years, Charlie Cook has been the gold standard for election forecasting and political trend analysis. In 2021, he stepped back, and Amy Walter, a top political analyst in her own right, took over the newsletter, which was renamed The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. But Charlie, now 72 and living in Maine, still writes a must-read column in National Journal. Earlier this year, Charlie was much more cautious about the midterms. Now he thinks President Trump’s unpopularity will decide the outcome. For the last few years, I’ve been part of a regular Zoom call with a couple dozen former Carter administration officials, plus a few journalists and others. Started by Les Francis, a former senior White House aide to Carter, it’s called Carter Old Farts Amiable Discussions, or COFAD. Last Sunday, Cook was COFAD’s guest. The following is excerpted from his remarks. Why Midterms Punish the President’s Party Donald Trump’s job approval ratings are usually in the mid-to-high 30s. The history is clear. Unless a party has a president with an approval rating in the 60s, as Bill Clinton did in 1998 and George W. Bush did in 2002, it will suffer losses. That party might lose just five or six seats, or it may lose 50 or 60, as Democrats did under Clinton in 1994 [when they lost 54 seats] and Obama in 2010 [when they lost 64 seats]. The post-World War II average is around 26 seats lost by the party in the White House. This is just as natural as it could be. People in a president’s party might be satisfied, complacent, a little disappointed, or deeply disillusioned, but they are rarely pumped up and energized, thinking, “I can’t wait to go vote.” Conversely, people in the opposition party, particularly in this era of hyperpartisanship, hate anything the president is doing. They hate everything he might even think about doing. Everything. They want to relitigate the last election. They can’t wait to vote. And then you’ve got this little slice of pure independents, and I’m not talking about the 45 percent of all adults or the third of all registered voters who claim to be independents but consistently lean toward and vote for one party. I’m talking about the three to six percent who don’t lean toward either party and are legitimate independents. They tend to be very fickle. They read,… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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