Welcome back to Beyond the Polls.

This week, I'll rant about where U.S. politics stands today and look at 26-year-old progressive

influencer Kat Abu Ghazale's new TV ads.

Let's dive in.

Well, here we are.

First week of February.

Groundhow Day has already happened, or is it recurring, or is that just a Bill Murray movie with a Buddhist theme? I don't know. But we are back at the beginning of midterm season, and boy, does it look similar, not identical, not as bad, but similar to how it looked at the beginning of 2018.

Let me start with the president's job approval numbers.

Now, you always get the headline numbers, you know, from all the aggregators and a lot

of the media polls tend to be a little bit worse than the aggregated polls that don't

include the polls that are sponsored by the television stations. But the fact is, the president is sitting below 43% job approval.

Now, as you've heard before, that actually understates them a little bit.

The gap between all adults' polls and registered voter slash likely voter polls is now the largest

it has been in the last few months.

Over five points.

His average in the all adult polls in the Real Clear Politics average is 39.7%.

His average in registered voter slash likely voter polls is 43.9%.

Now, 43.9%, let's round it to 44, probably means like a 44, 45,

if you are looking at Election Day, because there's always people who won't vote, who say

they're registered voters, and either won't vote or in fact not registered voters. But the fact is,

that is roughly where he was on Election Day in 2018, and we know what happened then.

As I've said before, presidential job approval rating is the single best predictor, better than the congressional ballot of where the president's party is going to be on election day.

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