IS THIS AN ANTI-REPUBLICAN WAVE OR AN ANTI-STATUS-QUO WAVE?

Yesterday, Nate Silver wrote this:

A New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll out this morning had some disappointing news for Democrats, with Susan Collins leading Troy Jackson by 3 points in Maine.

Other NYT polls had Democrats ahead by 5 points in Michigan and New Hampshire. Still, this poll feels like a “heat check” for Democrats....

Polls have shown Democrats massively overperforming in red states, especially in the Midwest....

By contrast, though, Democrats’ polling has been pretty “mid” in blue states.

Sure, maybe Collins, as one of the few truly moderate members left in Congress, is an exception to the throw-the-bums out mood. The other NYT polls were perfectly fine for Democrats....

In some ways, it’s more surprising to see Chris Pappas only ahead by 5 points in New Hampshire — or Peggy Flanagan in a close-ish race in Minnesota, or Kathy Hochul struggling to achieve a double-digit lead in New York. (Though other polls disagree there.)

So if you take the polls at face value, we’re seeing a blue wave that’s … overwhelmingly concentrated in red states.

The Times poll of Maine is, as the paper's Nate Cohn admits, an outlier -- both the University of New Hampshire and the University of Massachusetts have just released polls showing Jackson beating Collins. But the Democratic leads are modest -- 4 points in the UNH poll, 5 points in the UMass poll.

Democrats are beating past performance in red states by double digits. Why not in blue states?

I think two things are happening this year: many voters are eager to punish President Trump, and many voters are eager to vote against the status quo. In red states -- Ohio, Iowa, Texas -- those motives combine to help Democrats. If you're an anti-Trump and anti-GOP partisan, you're especially motivated to vote Democratic this year -- and if you're not a partisan but you think this country is going to hell in a handbasket, you want to blow the system up. The system where you live is Republican, and has been for years. So you want to vote Democratic, too.

But in blue America, "blow up the system" voters see Democrats as the system. I think that's what's keeping some Democrats in Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York from achieving strong showings in the polls.

I'm being somewhat flexible in my definition of "blue America." New Hampshire isn't really blue -- it has a Republican governor and a Republican House and Senate. But the state's entire congressional delegation is Democratic (the Senate seat is currently held by retiring Democrat Maggie Hassan), and it's a very small state surrounded by other strongly Democratic states. Nearly one in six New Hampshire workers work out of state, and most of those commuters work in very blue Massachusetts. New England is regionally blue. So voting Democratic doesn't seem like a way to blow up the system.

In Maine, Susan Collins has always managed to persuade a large portion of the electorate that she's different from the rest of the system. Those voters don't want to blow her up. And in New Hampshire, the Republican Senate candidate is a member of the widely admired Sununu family. So my template doesn't fit every blue or blue-ish state perfectly. But in general, I think it explains why Democrats aren't running away with many Northern-state elections.

A Democratic wave election seems extremely likely this year even though much of America is wary of the Democratic Party. That's because voters are very angry at Trump and very angry at the system. Democrats haven't improved their image much. They haven't established a strong identity that's being embraced by the voters. It's going to work out this year, but in the long term they'll need to be seen as a party that stands for popular, compelling ideas, and they'll need to show results. They're overperforming this year because they're out of power nationally and locally in many places, at a time when millions of people hate the majority of people in power.