Republicans, to be sure, seem to have an endless reservoir of outrage these days. Among the latest smallish things to get the right wing's underpants into a collective twist was a poll released several days ago by ABC and the Washington Post.
There was much within the poll for the GOP to be concerned about. It had the "generic ballot test" for next year's midterm election at a twelve-point Democratic edge (generally speaking, an even wider edge than was found in October surveys back in 2008). It showed a striking level of support for the Public Option. On top of it all, it gave the president a 57% job approval rating.
Yet these were all ancillary complaints for the conservative fringe. Their largest concern: the poll showed that just 20% of those surveyed self-identified as Republicans. Democrats made up 33% of the sample, while Independents made up the largest group in the sample at 42%.
This led Newt Gingrich, joined by a chorus of voices in the right-wing blogosphere, to get positively indignant:
Well, it tells me first of all that the poll's almost certainly wrong. It's fundamentally different from Rasmussen. It's fundamentally different from Zogby. It's fundamentally different from Gallup. It's a typical Washington Post effort to slant the world in favor of liberal Democrats.
It is perhaps not surprising that a right-wing ideologue like Gingrich would push GOP-friendly Rasmussen as some kind of an exemplar. And, as Pollster's Mark Blumenthal pointed out in his own fine article on this kerfluffle, Zogby does not disclose its party ID breakdown publicly.
But Gallup did, and as ABC News' polling unit director Gary Langer pointed out in his excellent takedown of Gingrich, it isn't all that different than what ABC News showed. Nor did a large number of other pollsters:
Partisan Breakdown, Political Public Opinion Polls, R/D/I
ABC/WaPo (10/18)--20/33/42
CBS News (10/8)--22/33/45
AP/GfK (10/5)--21/33/26
Ipsos/McClatchy (10/5)--19/33/48
Gallup (10/4)--27/33/38
Pew (10/4)--23/34/37
NBC/WSJ (9/20)--18/31/43
Unless Gingrich is prepared to indict pretty much every pollster in America save for Rasmussen and Fox News, it would appear that he is seriously out of line alleging that Langer and his crew cooked the books.
Especially when other theories are infinitely more plausible. After all, what we are talking about is political self-identification. In other words, the pollster asks the respondent to identify their own affiliation.
There are no shortage of polls that tell us that voters are not particularly thrilled with either political party (our most recent tracking poll here at DK proves that conclusively). It is also not hard to find data that the GOP brand name is damaged considerably worse than the Democratic party brand: consider this week's CNN Poll (PDF), where approval of the Republican Party was at 36%, the lowest level for the GOP in a CNN-sponsored poll since the impeachment saga of late 1998.
Given this fact, it is not terribly surprising to learn that voters might not want to identify themselves as Republican to a pollster. Indeed, someone with conservative leanings might be as apt to identify themselves as an Independent as a Republican, given the current base disenchantment with the party. After all, does the name Doug Hoffman ring a bell? Base dissatisfaction is certainly going to lead to an exodus of some kind. We have even seen that phenomenon among Democrats this year, although not as acutely. Last year's polls showed Democratic indentification routinely in the high 30s and low 40s. That table cited by Langer had tremendous consistency, with Democrats in the 31-34% range.
One must also consider the possibility that the relative paucity of people self-identifying as Republicans could be traced to their relegation to the minority party over the last four years. There's a reason why it is not hard to find people sporting Lakers and Celtics gear but not too many folks rocking the Memphis Grizzlies attire. People usually do not fall all over themselves to identify with a loser, and the GOP has been on a pretty brutal losing streak as of late.
So, in the final analysis, it appears that Gingrich and the rest of the right-wing scolds have, to some extent, a raging case of misplaced anger. Their anger at ABC's polling unit is a deflection of the real problem: genuine anger many Republicans are directing at their own party--an extension of the GOP civil war which is apparent to anybody closely following American politics but curiously underreported by the traditional media, ever eager to instead breathlessly report on the Obama polling collapse that has been more of a retraction of a bounce than a genuine collapse.
Quibbles about Republicans in the sample are rather besides the point, anyway. As long as the newly minted Independents vote Republican in the 2010 midterms, then how they choose to identify themselves to a pollster is largely irrelevant.
One thing that has been a pretty consistent characteristic of polls in the Obama presidency is that Independents are not behaving the same as they did in 2006 or 2008. In those two election cycles, Independents almost behaved as soft Democrats, leaning much closer to the Democrats on issue and electoral polling than they did the GOP. In 2009, that has not been the case. In the best case scenario, they've broken even. In some cases, they leaned just slightly to the right-of-center.
This almost certainly means that the drop in Republican identification is not so much an ideological shift as it is a shift in nomenclature. In other words, as the number of people self-identifying as Republican has dropped, the number of right-leaning Independents has increased (and presumably, close to proportionally).
Therefore, one can presume that unless there is a real spike in third-party candidacies (call it the Daggett effect, or perhaps the Hoffman effect), those Independents will either stay home (which could have a real and deleterious effect for Republicans) or they will revert to form.
The team over at Public Policy Polling looked at the potential for third-party candidates in 2010, and gauged their potential support. In a shrewd decision, they polled a standard Dem vs. GOP generic ballot for 2010, and then they also included a generic ballot with a third option. In the standard two-way calculation, the Democratic Party led by eight points (48-40). With the third option included, 22% of voters selected that third-option, with the Democratic lead stretching out to double digits (40-29-22).
In a sign that the new surge in Independents may well be right of center--consider this demographic breakdown: 29% of conservative voters would opt for that third-party option in 2010 if it were available, versus just 9% of liberals.
The bottom line is that the sampling data for the ABC poll last week is important, but far from the reason that Gingrich and the right-wing chorus alleges.
This is not an object lesson in a liberal media trying to bring down the GOP. It is, however, further evidence that the Republican brand name is badly wounded, and that there is a real and deep schism in the modern-day GOP.
