It’s beginning to look a lot like Biden-mas as we arrive at Election Eve. The predicted Red Wave now looks inevitable, as we have watched The Sudden Republican Momentum® narrative unfold as expected in such cycles. Despite a last-moment Hail Mary from NBC News in giving Dems a +1 in their latest generic-ballot poll — which would still look good for Republicans — the current RCP aggregate average gives the GOP a 2.5% advantage and support at a year-long high.

Worth noting, though: the sample split in the NBC News poll was 35% Democrats, 30% Republicans, and 31% independents. NBC then assigns leaners to the parties to come up with a 43/41 Democrat advantage among likely voters. The latest Gallup poll shows a very different electorate, however, which I noted yesterday in the Headlines:

GALLUP POLL: Do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent? (with Indie leaners)

Republican — 48% (R+6)
Democrat — 42%
Pure Indies no lean — 10%

Trends:
⦿ Oct 2018: 42/53 (D+11)
⦿ Oct 2014: 47/41 (R+6)
⦿ Oct 2010: 45/43 (R+2)https://t.co/IOe3jiubeU pic.twitter.com/HiQdI6Kqkd

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) November 6, 2022

Gallup, which has a gold-standard longitudinal series on party affiliation, sees the electorate overall at 33/29 Republicans, and 48/42 with leaners. And that isn’t even with a likely-voter model in place in a cycle where Republicans lead on enthusiasm in every poll, or close to it.

What else have pollsters missed?  The Wall Street Journal reports that the erosion of Democrat affiliation — or at least support — comes in two key demographics that they have long taken for granted. Republicans aren’t winning either, but they’re getting more competitive:

The Republican Party is winning support from a larger share of Black voters than in other recent elections and has improved its standing in the past few months among Latino voters, the latest Wall Street Journal poll finds, adding to evidence of the party’s increasing appeal among groups that have overwhelmingly favored Democratic candidates.

About 17% of Black voters said they would pick a Republican candidate for Congress over a Democrat in Journal polls both in late October and in August. That is a substantially larger share than the 8% of Black voters who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 and the 8% who backed GOP candidates in 2018 House races, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large survey of voters who participated in those elections.

Among Latino voters, Democrats held a lead of 5 percentage points over Republicans in the choice of a congressional candidate in the Journal’s October survey, a narrower advantage than the Democrats’ 11-point lead in August.

Both findings suggest a deterioration in Democratic support as Latino voters show high degrees of concern about inflation and the direction of the economy. Latino voters in 2020 favored President Biden over Mr. Trump by 28 percentage points and Democratic candidates in 2018 House races by 31 points, VoteCast found.

We’ve seen plenty of data to support this in other polls, and not just overall. In Florida, the movement of Hispanic voters has grown so significant that Democrats now glumly concede that the GOP may well win Miami-Dade this cycle — a major power base for Democrats for decades. In Texas and in other border states, the constant siege of Joe Biden’s border crisis has alienated Hispanic voters, pun very much intended, as all of the attendant miseries of such disruption keep growing.

What about black voters? The movement there is clearly more incremental, but it doesn’t take much of an increment to matter. For decades, Democrats have had an iron grip on the African-American demographic, routinely getting 90% of it or more. Even that has only meant that Democrats compete roughly evenly with Republicans in national elections, as the shifts in control of the House, Senate, and White House demonstrate. Even if Republicans only go from 8% to 17% of the black vote, that’s enough to win a lot of elections that Democrats would otherwise win.

This shift is almost certainly situational and temporary, at least among black voters; it might be more sustained among Hispanics, however. But even to the extent that it’s situational, Democrats don’t seem inclined to change the situation. Andrew Sullivan explained the problem succinctly on Friday:

In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went. Even the policy most popular with the center — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state. What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the center?

It therefore doesn’t surprise me that in his final pitch to voters this week, Biden barely mentioned his record. He didn’t talk about inflation, the looming recession, crime, immigration, Covid. He mentioned nothing that would motivate anyone beyond his own base.

He returned instead to his previous 2020 electoral blackmail: you have no choice but to vote for Democrats because the far right is so hostile to democracy. To which my answer would be: Well, I did that already. And I was treated like an easy mark by the Dems — who pocketed my vote and ignored all of my concerns. Voting for an actual election denier would remain a dealbreaker for me. But otherwise, when Trump is not on the ballot, why would I be suckered by the woke left again?

Worse than this bait-and-switch is the condescension that came with it. Think of the absolute assertions by the Biden administration and their media flunkies: The border is secure. Covid vaccines prevent infection. There is no CRT in high schools. The lab-leak theory and Hunter Biden’s corruption were disinformation. There is no medical debate about fast-track, affirmation-only, sex changes for minors. Inflation is caused by corporate greed. Women in college always tell the truth; and men always lie. A president can forgive student loans by fiat. Debt doesn’t matter. A woman can have a penis. The people who attack Asian-Americans are all white supremacists. The idea of individual merit is racist. Can you think of any social issue where the Biden administration hasn’t taken the position of the illiberal “social justice” left?

Will Biden and Democrats learn this lesson in a red-wave electoral disaster? It’s easy to think so, but don’t forget who will lose tomorrow in a red-wave scenario. Hint: it’s not going to be the hard-Left progressives, who come from almost impossibly safe House districts and deep-blue states for Senate seats. It will be the centrists that get wiped out, along with the more-Left liberals. The rump Democrat caucuses will be almost entirely hard-Left if not completely so, and will elect leadership that will keep leading their party down the primrose paths that Sullivan outlines so clearly.

And that will likely mean that the shifts seen thus far in polling, both in demographics and party affiliation, will at least be sustained if not increased. This may not be a realignment election, but it might be the start of a realignment. Assuming the GOP doesn’t double down on crazy over the next two years themselves, that is, and focus on what matters to voters rather than to themselves.