Weekly Tracking Poll: Pelosi At A Six-Month High

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 11/16/2009-11/19/2009. All adults. MoE 2% (Last weeks results in parentheses):

	FAVORABLE	UNFAVORABLE	NET CHANGE
PRESIDENT OBAMA	55 (56)	39 (38)	-2
PELOSI:	40 (39)	51 (52)	+2
REID:	32 (32)	58 (57)	-2
McCONNELL:	14 (15)	68 (67)	-2
BOEHNER:	13 (14)	65 (65)	-1
CONGRESSIONAL DEMS:	42 (41)	53 (52)	0
CONGRESSIONAL GOPS:	13 (14)	71 (71)	-1
DEMOCRATIC PARTY:	44 (43)	50 (49)	0
REPUBLICAN PARTY:	23 (22)	67 (67)	+1

Full crosstabs here. This poll is updated every Friday morning, and you can see trendline graphs here.

For the first time in quite a while, this is a week where most of the results can be attributed to a fairly undecipherable bit of float. There were no consistent partisan patterns in the numbers: the GOPers in the Congress lose a point, while the GOP in general actually gains back a point off of its recent losses.

There is one headline emerging out of the recent polling, however. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, this graph speaks better to the recent trend than I ever could:

On what one could call "Black Friday" in the history of the Daily Kos tracking poll (September 4th), the Democrats were in their bleakest moments of public esteem for the year. This was the week where Barack Obama scored the weakest favorability numbers (+9; 52/43) of his presidency.

On that day, coincidentally, both Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suffered from the same doldrums of net favorability: -27.

Now, just ten weeks later, Nancy Pelosi stands at a -11 net favorability. While that is not exactly a statistical achievement to write home about, it is a substantial improvement over her standing in early September.

Meanwhile, Senator Reid still languishes at -26, essentially unchanged in that same ten week period. Whereas Speaker Pelosi's favorables with Democrats stand at 85%, Senator Reid's favorables with his own party sit at just 64%.

However, it would be wrong to presume that this is strictly a base-driven separation in their numbers. Take a look at how the standing of these two political leaders have changed with Independent voters from the Labor Day weekend until now.

Favorables Among Independents, 11/19/09 (9/3 results in parens)

Nancy Pelosi (D): 28 (20)
Harry Reid (D): 24 (27)

This poll finding challenges an awful lot of conventional wisdom. As everyone here well knows, Speaker Pelosi has been far more aggressive than her Senate colleague on health care reform.

The purveyors of conventional wisdom would no doubt argue that while that might keep "the liberal base" happy, it will be political suicide with Independents. Yet Nancy Pelosi's favorability has risen markedly with Independents, while the more incremental and cautious Harry Reid has actually seen his standing with Independents dissipate by a few points.

The punditocracy has also suggested that opposition to aggressive reform is the ticket to the hearts of the Independent voter.

So, how have the two leading architects of "just say no" fared with Independent voters?

Favorables Among Independents, 11/19/09 (9/3 results in parens)

Mitch McConnell (R): 5 (13)
John Boehner: 5 (6)

Even at the height of the "teabagger summer", both of the GOP leaders had minimal support with Independent voters. All the past ten weeks have managed to do is take meager favorability numbers, and make them even smaller.

On our variation of the generic ballot test, the Democrats maintain a six-point advantage (37-31). The Independent voters are still the biggest pool of undecided voters, with 60% of Indies refusing to get off the fence. This is something that Democrats have to be mindful of, because as Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling pointed out last week, voters that disapprove of both parties (as Independents tend to do) are more likely to vote GOP. The key is work on turning Independent voters into soft Democratic supporters. Based on the recent favorability figures, one Democratic congressional leader seems to have a better solution for doing so than the other.