Polls Suggest Election Day Debacle Looming for Democrats

Wednesday, 06 Oct 2010 01:37 PM
By: David A. Patten

With less than a month to go before the midterm elections, Democrats could face an Election Day debacle based on a flurry of new polls that suggest independent voters will break strongly for Republicans.

Poll results from a variety of sources indicate Democrats may be unable to mitigate the political wave most pundits foresee heading their way.

Increasingly, analysts say, the question is not whether a frustrated electorate will whack Democrats on Nov. 2 — but only how badly.

"Right now, the GOP has message, money, and momentum," remarks former Bush media adviser Mark McKinnon, writing in The Daily Beast. "It's going to be pretty hard to screw it up."

Among the reasons McKinnon and other Republican insiders are increasingly bullish on their prospects:

Although the latest Gallup poll shows Republicans only 3 points ahead in the generic-party balloting, when the results are filtered to include only likely voters, Republicans enjoy a whopping 18-point advantage, 56 percent to 38 percent.

A Zogby International Poll conducted for The O'Leary Report that was released at noon on Wednesday shows that 68 percent of independent voters nationwide favor a federal hiring freeze. Among all likely voters, 71 percent want to freeze payroll increases. Such results appear to play strongly into the tea party narrative that has already had a major impact on primary elections this cycle.

Almost 70 percent of voters say their feelings about President Obama will be an important factor when they cast their ballots, according to a new poll by The Hill. That's a bad indicator for Democrats given the president's low job approval numbers. Another ominous finding for Democrats: Independents favor a divided government — meaning different parties controlling the White House and Congress — by a 53 to 30 percent margin.

Increasingly, the disdain for healthcare reform is bipartisan, The Hill poll shows. In 12 key battleground districts, 56 percent of voters said they want a flat-out repeal of Obamacare. The key undecided demographic favored repeal by a 49 percent to 27 percent margin. Even among Democrats, nearly 25 percent favored repeal. Pollster Mark Penn tells The Hill, "There's no question that the independents are largely coming to the side of the Republican Party and are extremely dissatisfied with Congress."

The turnout among Latino voters, who cast ballots disproportionately for Democrats, is depressed. The Pew Hispanic Center released a poll Tuesday indicating only 51 percent of registered Latino voters say they will vote, compared to 70 percent of registered voters generally. This would suggest President Obama's attempt to rouse his base by castigating the Arizona immigration law has failed. Pew found that only 32 percent of registered Latino voters say they have given the upcoming election "quite a lot" of thought, compared to 50 percent of registered voters nationwide.

An analysis by the Weekly Standard's Jay Cost averaged five major polls to show Republicans with a whopping 42 percent to 30 percent edge over Democrats among independent voters. Other polls show that the president's job approval among independents at only about 40 percent. Cost sees a "distinct possibility" that Republican gains in the House will exceed 52 seats — far more than the 39 needed to regain control.
One reason Democrats are facing stiff political headwinds: Voters in some districts are angry over their decision to skip out of Washington without extending the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire in January. Republican challengers are hitting incumbent Democrats for voting against amendments that would have extended the lower tax rates.

One example of how difficult the going is for Democrats in this cycle: The Hill/ANGA poll examined 12 hotly contested House races that may determine which party runs the 112th Congress, in districts ranging from Michigan, Arizona, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Of those 12 districts, 11 Republican candidates are ahead in their races. The 12th race was a tie.

"In our system, you don't just have to win over the populace, but you have to get them to the polls," left-leaning Ezra Klein of wrote Tuesday in his Washington Post blog.

The title of his piece suggested Democrats could lose as many as 86 seats if turnout is low.

GOP strategist and marketing guru McKinnon, the president of Austin, Texas-based Maverick Media, writes that his only concern is overconfidence.

"There are only two ways to run a political race: scared or unopposed," McKinnon writes. "You have to run like you’re losing."

http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/polls-g ... /id/372816