All summer long, Republicans have been flooding the media with positive internal polling. Meanwhile, the corresponding silence from Democrats has only added to the rapidly darkening conventional wisdom about November.
That's what makes what you will read below such a pleasant surprise:
House race polls conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, Anzalone Liszt, Benenson Strategies, and Global Strategy Group on behalf of the DCCC. Conducted on differing dates between August 23 and September 2. Likely voters. MoE 4.9%
AL-02: Rep. Bobby Bright (D) 52%, Martha Roby (R) 43%
NY-24: Rep. Michael Arcuri (D) 50%, Richard Hanna (R) 37%
NC-08: Rep. Larry Kissell (D) 48%, Harold Johnson (R) 36%*
SD-AL: Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D) 50%, Kristi Noem (R) 39%*
VA-05: Rob Hurt (R) 44%, Rep. Tom Perriello (D) 42%*
(*)--Indicates third-party candidate drawing 4-6% of the vote.
The DCCC had hung onto these polls for a week, and their release appears to have been inspired by a particularly brutal story run over the weekend by the New York Times. Over the weekend, the Times released one of the bleakest assessments of the electoral landscape, arguing that the DCCC had already thrown several incumbents over the side, in order to put their resources in more winnable environments.
This story was the catalyst for an immediate and forceful rebuttal from DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen, in which he referred to the allegation that Democrats had already specified certain races as lost causes as "erroneous."
Given that the NYT story had specifically cited Perriello as one of those races that the DCCC was planning to toss under the bus, the inclusion of numbers from the Virginia 5th appeared to be a deliberate counterweight to the NYT's allegations.
Whatever the genesis of this polling dump might have been, it is most welcome to see that the DCCC is working hard at trying to counter what is becoming a rapidly hardening narrative about the state of play in the House.