Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 1/4/2010-1/7/2010. All adults. MoE 2% (Last weeks results in parentheses):
| FAVORABLE | UNFAVORABLE | NET CHANGE |
|---|
| PRESIDENT OBAMA | 56 (56) | 41 (40) | -1 |
| | | |
| PELOSI: | 42 (42) | 48 (49) | +1 |
| REID: | 33 (32) | 56 (57) | +2 |
| McCONNELL: | 18 (18) | 63 (64) | +1 |
| BOEHNER: | 19 (18) | 61 (62) | +2 |
| | | |
| CONGRESSIONAL DEMS: | 41 (40) | 55 (55) | +1 |
| CONGRESSIONAL GOPS: | 18 (17) | 65 (66) | +2 |
| | | | |
| DEMOCRATIC PARTY: | 42 (42) | 53 (54) | +1 |
| REPUBLICAN PARTY: | 30 (29) | 60 (61) | +2 |
Full crosstabs here. This poll is updated every Friday morning, and you can see trendline graphs here.
It is hard to divine discernible trends this week, the first full week of 2010. The Daily Kos "State of the Nation" tracking poll shows an incremental movement pretty much across the board, with that movement positive in all cases except for the president, who gives back a single point off his recent gains.
Digging into the numbers a little bit, we see three fairly interesting blips that could be legitimate movement. One is good news for the Democrats, while the other two are bad news for the Democrats.
The good news first: the right track/wrong track metric, which could be a critical indicator of Democratic prospects given the fact that they are "in charge" of both Congress and the White House, has started to creep back towards parity. It is still a long, long ways away from being able to whistle "Happy Days Are Here Again" (the RT/WT sits today at a net negative 16: 41/57). But that is a net shift of four points towards optimism in the last three weeks.
The first piece of bad news for the Blue team: there is still significant issues with voter intensity. This week, Democrats are offering their bleakest self-assessment of their voting intent. Only 53% of Democrats say that they are certain or likely to vote in November, versus 45% of Democrats who say that they are either unlikely to vote or certain not to vote. A lot of the forecasts of Democratic doom in November are predicated on this very "enthusiasm gap" between the two parties.
If there is a silver lining in this week's statistics on planned voter turnout in 2010, it is that Republican numbers are finally coming out of the stratosphere. While they are still considerably stronger than the Democrats, the days of over 80% of Republicans either being certain or likely to vote are gone. Today, that number sits at just 72%, the lowest that number has been since Research 2000 began asking that question back in November.
The second piece of bad news for the Democrats come in the form of the tracking poll's variation on the generic ballot test. While the Democratic lead on this question has not receded any further (it sits at three points ofr the third week in a row), it is worth noting that there has been a significant shift in the undecideds. Whereas once upon a time, Democrats could mollify themselves with the fact that the number of Democrats still undecided on their voting intentions were in the double digits, that reservoir of expected Democratic voters is now gone. While just 1% of Republican voters are still on the fence, the number of Democratic undecided voters is now also way down, to just 4%. What this means, as a practical matter, is that Democrats can no longer assume that they will pick up the lions share of the undecided vote.
Independents, as they have been all along, are still watching and waiting. In every poll of this Congressional preference test taken since the question began being asked in May, a majority of Independent voters consider themselves undecided. Ordinarily, Democrats could take comfort in the fact that 67% of Independents have unfavorable views of the GOP. The aggravating factor is that 61% of Independents also hold unfavorable views of the Democrats. And, as Tom Jensen at PPP has noted on more than one occasion, those voters who have contempt for both parties are considerably more likely to vote for the party out of power.
Which means that Democrats have an interesting needle to thread. They need to do enough for their base to ensure that those folks will shake off their relative indifference towards the 2010 elections, but they also have to drive up their favorabilities with Independent voters.
If the mantra that the main thing Independent voters want is results is true, it means that the Democratic Congress might need to be busier in 2010 than their natural tendency to be timid and cautious in an election year would dictate.
