DCCC Chair Rep. Sean Maloney was on Morning Joe today warning Democrats not to be “falling in love with mandates.” During the segment Morning Joe co-host Willie Geist asked Maloney “What has changed for you and what do you see ahead?” Maloney denied that there had been a “pivot” in Democrats thinking on COVID mandates, claiming it was merely an “inflection point.”

This afternoon SFGate’s Eric Ting got a look at internal DCCC polling which provides clear answers to the question Geist asked. What has changed is polling that shows GOP attacks on Democrats handling of COVID are very effective. As for what’s ahead, that would be electoral disaster unless Democrats pivot away from mandates.

Findings from the poll were presented to DCCC officials Thursday morning. One slide in the presentation, which was shared with SFGATE by someone who attended the presentation and was granted anonymity in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy, states, “Many of the Republican attacks tested have alarming credibility,” including Republican attacks on COVID-19 policy.

The poll found that that 57% of voters in competitive congressional districts agree with the statement, “Democrats in Congress have taken things too far in their pandemic response,” and 66% of self-defined “swing” voters in competitive districts agree with that statement. White and Hispanic voters in competitive districts were equally as likely to agree (59%), while Black voters (42%) and Asian voters (46%) disagreed with the statement. The poll also did not define what “taken things too far” means.

Of all of the bad news in this poll, the worst for Democrats may be that White and Hispanic voters “were equally as likely to agree” with the idea that Democrats went too far. We’ve covered this issue a lot since the Virginia election but obviously many of those white voters who believe Democrats went too far are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. If there’s a shift in Hispanic voting such that they are showing parity with those groups then Democrats are in deep, deep trouble.

The same DCCC poll had a lot of other bad news for Dems. some of which Ed mentioned yesterday.

Democrats’ own research shows that some battleground voters think the party is “preachy,” “judgmental” and “focused on culture wars,” according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

And the party’s House campaign arm had a stark warning for Democrats: Unless they more forcefully confront the GOP’s “alarmingly potent” culture war attacks, from critical race theory to defunding the police, they risk losing significant ground to Republicans in the midterms.

SFGate adds that Dems are actually doing slightly better on their handling of COVID than they are on several other hot button issues, defunding the police and border control.

In swing districts, 64% of voters agreed with the statement that “Democrats in Congress support defunding the police and taking more cops off of the street.” The internal poll found that 80% of self-defined swing voters in competitive districts agreed with the same statement.

On the border, 62% of respondents agreed “Democrats in Congress have created a border crisis.” Another statement a majority agreed with (61%) involved opposition to the teaching of critical race theory in schools. But it’s likely neither of those two issues are as important to voters as COVID policies at this moment.

Taken together this really does look like a looming disaster for Democrats. The party’s growing awareness of this data is probably why Joe Biden was recently in New York renewing his objections to defunding the police and why Maloney was on TV this morning claiming Democrats are growing tired of COVID mandates.

Curiously, Biden’s plan for dealing with weakness on the border issue seems to be to keep ignoring the problem in hopes it goes away. So far, thanks to a mostly compliant media, that’s working but I think it could backfire if border encounters surge again this spring like they have in recent years.

And that broader lesson applies to all of these issues, i.e. things can always get worse. God help the Biden administration if there’s another COVID variant or another union outburst or an ambush of police officers. These are all bad things that could happen and if they do, Dems may find themselves longing for the days when the president’s polling was above 40 percent.