One of the really important and underrated metrics in politics is partisan self-identification. Not which party "registers" more voters, but which party actual voters say they support. This is especially important among "independents" who are really just partisans without the label. A "Republican-leaning Independent" is a Republican.
Elliott Morris notes a massive shift in partisan identification since this time last year. Right before he was inaugurated last year, self-identification was R+4. Some of this was bandwagoning behind the winning candidate. By June it was D+3. The most recent sample was D+8. This is a bigger gap than in 2017-18, which led to the first Blue Wave. No doubt this was behind the mid-decade re-gerrymandering that Republicans threw all their weight behind.
However, this level of Democratic self-identification is what creates a dummymander, where they actually make some of their own districts competitive by diluting GOP districts to erode Democratic ones. At the end, Morris notes that this is not a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Democrats do have to actually turn out their voters, but the trend since Trump arrived on the scene has been that high frequency voters are now disproportionately Democratic, in ways that simply wasn't true before.
The DHS-created chaos in Minneapolis is not reflected in these numbers. Much like Trump's destruction of the East Wing, this is one of those visually compelling stories that tend to break through to low information voters. When Joe Rogan calls ICE a Gestapo type force, that's a really big deal in how the Ariana Grande voter will evaluate Trump.
If the economy drops into recession in the next 9 months, the GOP could lose their Senate seats in places like Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Montana. That's how profound this drop could be.
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