In the Rec Listed-diary, Democrats Surge in Generic Congressional Ballot, deaniac83 reports, "A just-released Gallup poll now gives Democrats a 6-point lead among registered voters in the generic Congressional ballot," further noting that this represents the "first statistically significant lead" for Democratic candidates since Gallup began weekly polling for this metic in March.
It is certainly hopeful news, particularly as it runs counter to the media narrative predicting significant electoral losses in the fall.
It also reminds me of my two favorite team sports, baseball and cycling.
If you'll permit me a mixed-sports-metaphor, baseball and cycling are marathons, not sprints. The baseball season is 162 games long, starting in April and ending in September; a cycling grand tour consists of twenty stages, twenty-one including a prologue, over three weeks, with just two rest days. The baseball season and the cycling grand tour take time to unfold, and as such, each sport shares similarly cautious adages.
In baseball, the adage is as follows:
No one wins anything in May.
As Sam Seaborn opined on The West Wing, "Every baseball team wins fifty-four games, every team loses fifty-four games, and it's what you do with the other fifty-four that matter." Each season some team has a hot start; a perennial basement dweller suddenly finds itself atop its division by a game-and-a-half, and fans begin to wonder if the long-wished-for "next year" may actually be this year.
The problem is, that however good the Pittsburgh Pirates or the Kansas City Royals may look at the end of May, by the end of September they are still the Pirates and the Royals, and a statistical clumping of wins early in the season, the front-loading of those fifty-four victories which most teams can reasonably expect to achieve, creates expectations which the club simply can't hope to meet over the course of 162 games.
In cycling, the adage is a slightly different:
No one wins a grand tour in the first week, but one can certainly lose it.
The organizers of the Tour de France took this so much to heart they all but stopped including a team time trial in recent editions of the great race. A time trial is a race-against-the-clock; time trials may be individual, one rider on the road at a time, or team, with the time of the first several riders counted as the time of all.
A cyclist who is a strong individual climber and time trialist could nonetheless find himself out of contention for the overall classification victory on the strength, or lack thereof, of their teams. To some, this sorting on the basis of team strength, which often correlates to the salaries the team can offer its riders, diminishes the competition.
So what does any of this have to do with the Gallup poll?
The Gallup poll assesses registered voters, and as Gallup itself notes, Democrats enjoy an advantage in party affiliation, one which actually maps pretty closely to the margin reported in the generic ballot poll.
More importantly, registered voters are not the same as likely voters. Gallup itself explains the difference thus:
Only a subset of the total population of citizens in a typical election will actually vote. This subset often has different characteristics than the total population. Thus, the results of a typical election are different than they would be if every citizen actually turned out and voted -- because the people who actually vote are different from the people who don't. If pre-election polls don't take this into account, they run the risk of estimating an election result that will differ from the actual vote on Election Day.
Polls of registered voters are unreliable compared to those of likely voters. To the diarist's credit, deaniac83 notes that Gallup does not poll likely voters this early in the election season.
And that makes sense, because no one wins anything in May. Or July, in this instance.
As one commenter noted in the other diary, this is a distinct improvement over the previous Gallup polls asking the same question since March. Results like these may provide some pushback against a media narrative consistently unfavorable to the Democrats.
But I think we overlook results like these from Pew at our peril.
With four months to go before Election Day, voting intentions for the House remain closely divided, and neither party has gained or lost much ground over the course of 2010. However, Republicans are much more engaged in the coming election and more inclined to say they are certain to vote than are Democrats. This could translate into a sizable turnout advantage for the GOP in November that could transform an even race among registered voters into a solid victory for the Republicans.
Fully 56% of Republican voters say they are more enthusiastic about voting this year than in previous elections – the highest percentage of GOP voters expressing increased enthusiasm about voting in midterms dating back to 1994. While enthusiasm among Democratic voters overall is on par with levels in 2006, fewer liberal Democrats say they are more enthusiastic about voting than did so four years ago (52% then, 37% today).
The Pew poll notes that the Democratic registration advantage among younger voters is countered by the Republican advantage among older voters who are also the largest group of - wait for it - likely voters.
Voters younger than 30 favor the Democratic candidate in their district by a wide margin (57% to 32%). Yet only half of young voters say they are absolutely certain to vote. Voters ages 50 and older favor the Republican candidate in their district by double digits (11 points) and roughly eight-in-ten (79%) say they are absolutely certain to vote.
In June 2006, Democrats held significant leads among both younger and older voters. Their advantage among voters under 30 was about the same as it is today (56% vs. 36%), but they also held a 14-point lead among voters 50 and older (52% to 38%).
Now before I'm accused of spreading doom and gloom, of demoralizing the base, of wishing for failure or setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy, I do think we have an ace in the hole this election cycle, and that ace is the Republican Party itself. The Republicans are in the process of driving themselves into a ditch.
And this is significant, because while no one wins a grand tour in the first week, one can certainly lose it.
Nevada Republicans imploded like a can of soda dropped in the Marianas Trench, snatching the likely defeat of the Democratic Senate Majority Leader from the slavering jaws of conservative victory. From Sue Lowden's "chickens-for-health-care" platform plank to Sharron Angle campaigning against bring jobs to Nevada, the Republicans handed the Democrats a gift by making Harry Reid look like King Solomon.
We've seen this same thing over and over again, in races all over the country. Demon sheep, racial discrimination as a right, tax cuts as free money: the Republicans continue to write the Democrats narrative for them.
The Democrats can't win anything in July, but they sure as hell can help some of the Republicans lose right now, in the same way that Rachel Maddow eviscerated Marco Rubio with gentle wit and simple facts this evening.
No one votes for a generic ballot. We vote for individual candidates, and by focusing our efforts on dropping a few Republicans now, and taking big turns for Democratic candidates in the fall, we can reach the podium in November. That means getting involved now, paying close attention to key races, supporting individual candidates.
Let the Republicans lose in the first week. We still have some tough mountain stages ahead of us, and Democratic candidates will need as many pairs of fresh legs as they can get.