Yeah, I know a polling firm can design and conduct a poll to fish practically any opinion they desire from the gullible, illiterate masses they routinely cull to produce their preferred result. That’s why reading the crosstabs (thanks, Allah) in these polls is important.It’s also why the polls sponsored by the old media during election cycles were so suspect. It got so bad that I routinely discounted all of those polls, including the NBC/Wall Street Journal sponsored polls (this because the Journal news columns regularly shed their credibility during elections).
However, Gallup and Rasmussen have been reporting some polling lately that should scare the hell out of Democrats in the business of getting elected.
PRINCETON, NJ — Americans’ favorable rating of the Democratic Party dropped to 41% in a late March USA Today/Gallup poll, the lowest point in the 18-year history of this measure. Favorable impressions of the Republican Party are now at 42%, thus closing the gap between the two parties’ images that has prevailed for the past four years.
Gallup last measured party images in late August/early September of last year. At that point, the Democratic Party enjoyed an 11-point favorable image advantage over the Republican Party. Now, the favorable ratings of the two parties are essentially tied.
Note, a tie in this type of poll is not good news for Democrats.Rasmussen opines that President Obama’s recently spiked after the last jobs report but has since subsided:
The President’s Approval Index ratings bounced following last Friday’s jobs report which showed the highest level of job creation in three years. However, that bounce appears to have faded– especially among unaffiliated voters. A similar pattern was found in our separate polling on consumer and investor confidence. Confidence spiked in the days following the jobs report but has since retreated back to the levels found last week.
There is no mystery in these reports. Last week’s jobs numbers were Potemkin metrics as evidenced by today’s report that jobless claims rose “unexpectedly” last week. How many times have BLS jobs reports been described as “unexpected” in the past year? I’ve lost count.
Most of the problems afflicting Democratic incumbents in 2010 and the President seem to revolve around unemployment and the failure of Congress and the President to adopt policies that promote private sector job growth. Fly over country voters understand this; the inside the beltway political class does not. Democrats ignore it because they have forgotten the results of 1994.
Update: After some additional analysis Hot Air notes this in the recent Gallup study:
Apart from a brief moment in 2005 when they were at net zero, not once in 18 years did the Democrats’ own favorable rating fall into negative territory — until halfway through last year, right around the time the great ObamaCare debate began. Follow the link to Gallup’s report and note how the trends in party favorables correspond to that. Among independents, the Dems are rock steady at 47 percent until last summer, when the bottom suddenly drops out; similarly, Republican support for the GOP was on a steady slide until precisely the same point, when it suddenly rebounded by 20 points in just three months.
The Liberal feet of clay are crumbling right now.
