As he often does, Tom Jensen of PPP goes inside the numbers and pulls out an incredibly fascinating nugget of data, with potential implications for the 2010 election cycle:
There's an interesting dichotomy right now in how Democrats and Republicans feel about their own parties. Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to think their party is headed in the right direction. But at the same time unhappy Democrats are much more likely to abandon their party at the polls this year than unhappy Republicans.
The hard numbers are nothing short of stunning. Among the nearly half of Republicans who currently express dissatisfaction with their party, only 9% are planning on voting Democratic in the Fall. But among the considerably smaller (about one-in-six) Democrats who are dissatisfied with the Blue team, 48% of them are voting Republican.
There might, of course, be a simple explanation for this dichotomy. One thing PPP doesn't apparently do is break down their national poll by region. Therefore, it is entirely possible that this "defecting Democrats" syndrome is sequestered largely in the South, where Democratic registration or self-identification often has diddly to do with actual voting behavior.
There are other possibilities, as well. It is possible that this is just a symptom of a perilous circumstance for Democrats that Jensen talked about six months ago. At the time, he noted that Republicans posted vast leads (in an Arkansas poll) among voters who disapproved of both parties. His rationale for this behavior was that if you disliked both parties, voting for the out-party at least offered the prospect of change. That could also explain this finding.
The implications for this are potentially grim for the Democrats. For one thing, it calls into question whether teabagger Independent candidacies will be the lifeline that Democrats might hope them to be. Even Republicans angry at their own party seem unflinchingly loyal at this point.
It also could lead Democratic strategists at the national level to juggle the idea of appealing to a dissatisfied centrist wing that will vote Republican to show their frustration versus trying to hold together a base that is only starting to close what has been a chasm of an enthusiasm gap.
In an election year filled with frustrating data points for Democrats, add this one to the pile.