Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Max SIMON ROSENBERG is pleased. For months, he has been the oracle of Democratic midterm optimism, metaphorically perched atop his think tank tower, examining public polling and insisting: No, no, no. A blue wave is coming! Up until now, he’s stood alone. But recently, a smattering of journalists and political pundits seem to be coming around to his view that JOE BIDEN and his party are better positioned for the upcoming elections than they previously thought. “I may have caught this a little bit early, but it's becoming conventional wisdom,” Rosenberg, the founder of the group NDN, said in a phone call with West Wing Playbook. A former Clinton administration staffer and top advisor to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rosenberg has been one of the only pundits making the public case that the party isn’t about to get creamed in the midterms. He’s argued this even as gas prices skyrocketed and inflation rose to levels not seen in decades, as Biden’s approval ratings tanked and the right track/wrong track dial for voters grew unimaginably bleak. On his think tank blog and with relentlessly cheerful Twitter posts, Rosenberg has made the case that a combination of factors have started tipping the midterms to Democrats. Among them, the damage to DONALD TRUMP’s political fortunes by the revelations from the Jan. 6 hearings, outrage over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, disgust at a spate of horrific mass shootings, and slightly more positive economic indicators like declining gas prices. “The election is moving, it’s not static. It could continue to move in Democrats’ direction, I think it will,” he said. Most major polling outfits suggest Republicans are likely to take the House and are locked with Democrats in a tight battle for the Senate. But Rosenberg does his own math. He said some polling aggregators are skewed by biased Republican polls and older surveys when Biden was less popular (some aggregators take into account a pollster’s lean and reputation as well as the date of the surveys). After tossing several polls by overtly right-leaning outfits, Rosenberg says his calculations put Democrats “in striking distance” of Republicans in the House. “I think the landscape will get more favorable to Democrats in the coming months,” he said, adding he thinks the party also will retain the Senate. “We’re ending this with momentum and the wind at our back, and Republicans are ending this with struggle. That’s why I’d rather be us than them right now.” On the surface, such proclamations would carry profound reputational risk. History is on the side of big Republican wins this cycle. If that were to happen, Rosenberg could be spending a fair bit of time wiping the egg bits off his face. But politics has a way of rewarding the audacious and counterintuitive. In addition to this profile you’re now reading, Rosenberg’s midterm optimism has earned him coverage elsewhere . It’s also found fans among some of his party’s most powerful figures, including White House chief of staff RON KLAIN, a friend of Rosenberg’s who retweets his sunny views on the status of the economy several times a week. Rosenberg said he knows many top Biden administration officials but he wouldn’t get into specifics with West Wing Playbook about his conversations with them, other than to note he has shared his forecasts for the midterms widely. “The White House is very aware of the arguments I’m making,” he said. “I’ve known most of the senior White House staff for years. These are all of my friends. We’re part of the same family, we all talk. That’s all I’m going to say.” Even with some of the political victories Biden has racked up in the last several weeks, Rosenberg remains in the minority of strategists who believe Democrats are on a winning track this fall. He’s regularly taken heat on Twitter from those who feel his analysis is essentially wishcasting cloaked in the veneer of poll analysis. But Rosenberg is hardly deterred. And now, he believes, the real world is finally catching up to him. Asked by West Wing Playbook whether he felt vindicated by the results of the Kansas referendum on abortion on Tuesday, Rosenberg succinctly replied: “Yes.” MESSAGE US — Are you VANESSA LION, the White House’s deputy policy director? We want to hear from you! And we’ll keep you anonymous if you’d like. Or if you think we missed something in today’s edition, let us know and we may include it tomorrow. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com .
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