The news coming from the polls -- both the surveys taken by pollsters and the actual election results coming from polling places in Pennsylvania, Arkansas and many other places -- these last few weeks has been encouraging for Democrats.
But today, I felt like I had been placed in a time machine and taken back to last August. From my Yahoo! home page today screamed this headline:
Gallup Poll shows largest Republican lead ever
Follow me below the fold and help me understand WTF is going on with the latest Gallup poll.
Yahoo! Political Writer Holly Baily led her story like this:
With five months to go before the general election, a new poll finds that Republicans have opened their widest lead yet when it comes to which party voters prefer this fall. Gallup's generic congressional ballot finds that the number of voters who say they will vote GOP has jumped to 49 percent, compared with 43 percent for Democrats. That's not only the biggest lead Gallup has recorded for the GOP this election cycle, it's the largest lead Republicans have ever had in the poll, which Gallup has run since 1950.
The article renews the idea of a "Republican surge," which both the article and Gallup attribute to a drop in President Obama's approval ratings, possibly the result of public dissatisfaction with the government's response to the BP oil spill.
Gallup also shows the so-called "enthusiasm gap" clearly favoring Republicans (and widening), while Research 2000 has shown that gap steadily narrowing in favor of Democrats.
In short, Gallup's numbers are not reflected by R2K or any other poll I've seen. The Gallup numbers also don't square with recent election results, which have shown the partisan wings of both parties -- Progressives on the Democratic side and "Tea Party" favorites on the Republican side -- winning their respective primaries; but Democrats of all stripes routinely beating Republicans in contested special elections (see PA-12).
Granted, this poll was just released today, but I've seen no analysis of it here on Daily Kos or on Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight site.
So, my fellow Kossacks, what do you think is going on? Is this a temporary bump, like that immediately following the passage of the health care bill in April, or the beginning of a disturbing trend which fortells electoral disaster for Democrats in November? Or is this poll simply an outlier with skewed results caused by some glitch in the methodology?
I tend to believe the first choice: If this "Republican surge" is real, it's a blip. But I'd like some analysis by someone who knows more about polling than me.