Yeahbut.
This is great news for the congressional races, but I don’t think it’s quite the slamdunk Darryl thinks for the presidential:
Every month, Rasmussen Reports releases a new partisan trends report based on monthly interviews of a huge number of people:
…the Democrats now have the largest partisan advantage over the Republicans since Rasmussen Reports began tracking this data on a monthly basis nearly six years ago.
During the month of April, 41.4% of Americans considered themselves to be Democrats. Just 31.4% said they were Republicans and 27.2% were not affiliated with either major party.
April was the third straight month that the number of Democrats topped 41%. Prior to February of this year, neither party had ever reached the 39% level of support.
[…]The partisan gap now shows the Democrats with a 10.0 percentage point advantage over the Republicans. That’s the largest advantage ever recorded by either party. In fact, before these past three months, the previous high was a 6.9 point percentage point edge for the Democrats in December 2006.
(…)
Republicans reached their peak numbers of 37.3% in September of 2004, and have been on a slow decline since.
Until about six months ago, the Democrats were holding steady at about 37% Democratic voter identity. The rise since December has been nothing short of stunning. Democrats had 36.3% identity in December and shot up to 41.5% in February—just about the time that the race started heating up.
(…)
A cautious statement would be that any damage done by the primary contest is minor at worst, as the damage has been more than offset by the Republican collapse, resulting in a net gain for Democrats.
An alternative explanation is that the primary-from-hell really has been a good thing for Democrats.
The thing is, will all those Democrats vote for Obama? How many of them are pissed-off Clinton supporters who are more angry at Obama than afraid of McCain? I think the Democrats should clean up in the downticket races – unless the Hillary supporters are so pissed off that they stay home altogether – but until I see Hillary enthusiastically campaigning for Obama (as she has said she will), I’m going to be nervous. And maybe even after that, if her supporters don’t come with her.
1 comment June 2nd, 2008 at 10:41pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Democrats,Elections,Politics,Polls
