It's good to be home.
Just shy of three months after the last edition of the Polling and Political Wrap graced the front page of Daily Kos, the Wrap makes its debut for 2012.
The reason for the hiatus was inherently logical: the confetti was still being swept up from the (mostly awful) 2010 cycle, and there simply was not a lot of data to justify the Wrap.
To an extent, that is still true. Who wants to blow their polling budgets on a raft of surveys a mere 21 months before voters go to the polls? There is still a pretty considerable dearth of data, which is why (for the time being) the Wrap will be a once-a-week item, to be found here on Sundays.
So, given the polling that has been conducted thus far in the cycle, are there any conclusions that can be drawn about the 2012 cycle? Indeed, there are. But first, the standard disclaimer:
Trying to draw conclusions about the status of elections with data 21 months out is like trying to predict the Super Bowl based on the first two drives of the game. There is a chance you might be seeing a trend that will carry itself throughout the duration of the contest. It is equally likely, in fact it is probably MORE likely, that the predictive value is limited to the "worth keeping an eye on" category.
Therefore, in this inaugural edition of the Wrap for the 2012 cycle, let's depart from the traditional format. Let's look inside the data to find a few thematic points worth keeping an eye on as the cycle progresses.
- Obama's 2012 GOP opponent is still a TOTAL unknown.
The early polling on the Republican presidential sweepstakes is remarkably consistent. What it tells us, thus far, is that there is not a legitimate frontrunner in the mix. Different pollsters since the curtain closed on the 2010 cycle have had Mitt Romney (NBC), Mike Huckabee (ABC), or Sarah Palin (Quinnipiac) in the lead. Romney has led more polls than his rivals, but all of them have been marked by narrow leads that lack much probative value.
What's more: since none of the prospective candidates breaks out of the teens in most cases, that means it will not take much for a current backmarker to move into a position of prominence. In other words, don't dismiss the idea of a John Thune, a Mitch Daniels, or a Haley Barbour moving into the lead. They would not need to travel far to move into the lead.
- Obama is in a better position now than he has been in over a year.
Another consistent finding in the early polling data is the fact that President Barack Obama has seen a modest, but consistent, uptick in his job approval and favorability numbers since the 2010 elections. As often is the case, it is probably best to get a visual verification of that trend from our friends at Pollster:
This has manifested itself in better 2012 trial heat numbers, as well. Our polling partners at PPP have been easily the most prolific pollsters in the game for the 2012 cycle. Their recent polling shows that President Obama stacks up surprisingly well in the early numbers, especially in the all-important smattering of states carried by Obama in 2008 and the GOP in 2004. Indeed, the only states that were clear longshots for the President in the early polling were Texas and West Virginia. Those are two states that, it is safe to say, did not figure heavily into the President's 2012 electoral math.
However, those leads might be exaggerated by a common effect early in the election cycle, which is the reluctance of GOP partisans to commit to supporting potential nominees other than their first choice. We saw this in a December NBC poll, where Obama led a trio of potential challengers (Romney, Thune, and Palin) by margins ranging from 7-23 points. However, when paired against a "generic Republican", the margin slid down to three points.
Furthermore, while the President's approval numbers have rebounded, it would be a stretch to call them "good." His Pollster average (49/44) is pretty similar to where George W. Bush was in 2004. Which would seem to indicate that, if the President's approval numbers stay in the same neighborhood, we can expect a toss-up election (unless the nominee's last name is Palin).
- The 2010 electorate looks more like aberration than trend.
It is almost unprecedented in contemporary American political history to see two consecutive cycles so diametrically opposed as 2008 and 2010 were. This begs a natural question--will the real American electorate please rise?
There are some early indicators that the 2010 elections were more of an aberration than a trend. The most critical acknowledgement of that is in a levelling of the "enthusiasm gap" that contributed to the massive Democratic losses of the 2010 cycle. As PPP noted last month, a slightly higher percentage of Democrats in their recent national polling indicated enthusiasm about the 2012 election than did the GOP (85% to 82%). That marks a stark reversal of the 2010 cycle, when the GOP routinely outpaced the Democrats on this metric, and often by wide margins.
This has manifested itself in some interesting swings in the generic polling of Congressional preferences (district polling, prior to redistricting, would be pretty useless at this point). Even GOP friendly Rasmussen sees some movement. Our own State of the Nation tracking poll (conducted by PPP) put the GOP lead at two points. Republicans carried the total House vote in 2010 by a little over six percentage points.
- Democratic control of the Senate is a big sidebar story for 2012.
While Democrats lost control of the House in 2010, a potentially bigger story was the fact that they also shed a half-dozen seats in the Senate. The reason why those GOP pick-ups were significant is that they came in the cycle before the one Senate Republicans were already salivating over.
You see, to understand the climate for Senate races, one not only needs to know the current political climate, they need to remember what the climate had been six years earlier. And, in 2006, the Democrats cleaned up on the Senate level, threading the needle and picking up every close race in their successful bid to control the Senate.
Which was great news in 2006. In 2012, however, that means that virtually all of the competitive seats are going to come from the Democratic side. Any Republicans that might prove politically vulnerable were washed away six years ago.
For the Democrats, this means that all that remains is the hopes that someone retires, or gets teabagged in the primary and replaced with an unelectable candidate. Of course, the 2010 cycle provided precedent for the latter scenario.
As it stands now, however, the only perilous retirement has come from our side (Conrad in North Dakota). And the incumbents who seem most vulnerable all lie on the Democratic side of the aisle.
Early numbers (except for in Nebraska) show that while there is cause for concern, there is not yet cause for panic. A GOP poll by Wilson Research out of Michigan shows freshman Democrat Debbie Stabenow with single digit leads over her likeliest GOP foes: former Congressman Peter Hoekstra (47-41) and Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land (46-41). Meanwhile, in Missouri, a GOP-sponsored poll from SurveyUSA gives incumbent Claire McCaskill a four-point edge over Congressman Sam Graves (48-44), and claimed that he polled best against the Democrat (which means we should assume that state treasurer Sarah Steelman was further back). Meanwhile, newly elected Senator Joe Manchin seems to be in decent shape in West Virginia, despite the growing hostility to Democrats in that once-blue state. Only GOP Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito comes close to the incumbent, and even she trails by nine points (50-41).
Other, earlier, polling covered here at DK showed that New Jersey freshman Democrat Robert Menendez was in solid shape, and in fact was safer politically than longtime Utah Republican Orrin Hatch.
The early conclusion, therefore, is that while Democrats seem highly unlikely to pad their majority in 2012, there is at least some chance that they can preserve it. Only two seats seem like real longshot holds at this point (ND-Open and NE-Nelson), and while there are a number of others in real peril (MT-Tester perhaps the most vulnerable), they all at least have avenues to victory.
- The House picture is muddy, and will be for a while.
Generic House polling, as indicated earlier, is showing a slight rebound for Democrats in the wake of their 51-45 defeat last November nationally. However, any predictive value in that data is minimized by the simple fact that we haven't a clue about how 98% of the House will look politically until the redistricting process is complete.
Republican gains in the 2010 cycle might have been profound at the federal level, but they were even more so at the state legislative level. This means that the GOP will definitely have more hands on the levers of power as it relates to redistricting during the coming year.
Of course, they did in 2001-02, as well. Therefore, presumptions of electoral doom might be a bit overstated. That said, hopes for more legitimate redistricting in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania are sure to go out the window as a result of last Fall's election results.
And, certainly, there is cause for concern with the new Census data. As Nate Silver pointed out back in December, seventeen of the twenty CDs in America with the highest population are held by Republicans. What this means, as a practical matter, is that they will have to contract in order to create population equity among districts. Which means that they will be shedding Republican voters into neighboring districts, at least some of which will be Dem-or-swing districts.
Of course, this level of speculation is all for naught until someone starts producing maps. One invaluable resource for Democrats wanting to understand that process is the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
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And with that, we can consider ourselves caught up on the 2012 election cycle thus far. Starting next Sunday, the Wrap will return to its more general format of encapsulating the polling and campaign news of the week. Here's hoping you will make this a regular stop in your weekly search for political news