The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
● House: The Democratic group Patriot Majority USA has just published a second big batch of House polls conducted by Public Policy Polling, and the numbers look very positive for Democrats. All of the districts tested are held by Republicans, and the results are summarized in the table below:
| District | Democrat | %age | Republican | %age | Margin |
| CA-25 | Generic Dem | 50 | Steve Knight | 38 | 12 |
| CA-48 | Generic Dem | 51 | Dana Rohrabacher | 41 | 10 |
| FL-26 | Generic Dem | 53 | Carlos Curbelo | 39 | 14 |
| IL-06 | Generic Dem | 51 | Peter Roskam | 41 | 10 |
| MI-06 | Generic Dem | 41 | Fred Upton | 42 | -1 |
| MN-03 | Dean Phillips | 46 | Erik Paulsen | 42 | 4 |
| NE-02 | Brad Ashford | 49 | Don Bacon | 40 | 9 |
| NJ-02 | Generic Dem | 44 | Generic GOP | 39 | 5 |
| NJ-07 | Generic Dem | 42 | Leonard Lance | 41 | 1 |
| NJ-11 | Generic Dem | 46 | Rodney Frelinghuysen | 44 | 2 |
| NY-19 | Generic Dem | 46 | John Faso | 40 | 6 |
| NY-22 | Anthony Brindisi | 47 | Claudia Tenney | 41 | 6 |
| TX-07 | Generic Dem | 49 | John Culberson | 39 | 10 |
| TX-32 | Generic Dem | 48 | Pete Sessions | 43 | 5 |
| WI-01 | Randy Bryce | 39 | Paul Ryan | 46 | -7 |
(Note: NJ-02 can be found in a separate memo.)
As you can see, most of these polls featured generic Democrats rather than actual candidates, so as usual we urge caution in interpreting this data. But the reliance on these unnamed stand-ins reflects a happy problem for Democrats: We have so many races with multiple credible contenders that it simply wouldn’t make sense to pick a single name out of the pile. (And if you’re trying to poll quickly and cheaply in a whole bunch of districts, you also don’t want to ask about every possible candidate.)
And those margins, as you can see, represent a very unhappy problem for Republicans. Some particularly stand out, such as the two Texas seats, which are home to longtime GOP incumbents who haven’t ever been seriously threatened. The same is true for Peter Roskam in Illinois, who’s cruised to re-election in his last several races.
Overall, these numbers are much better than those in Patriot Majority’s last set of polls taken last month, which largely showed a bunch of very close races in dozen GOP-held seats. PPP polled a different set of districts this time, so we can’t make any direct comparisons, but if these results are in fact reflective of the overall House picture, Democrats should be able to make things competitive next year.