A modest shift in public polling toward Democrats is giving some Democratic leaders hope that talk of a wave election has been overstated and that the public is -- to some degree at least -- swinging back behind the President and his party. Both President Obama's job approval ratings and the generic ballot figures have edged toward parity over the last month, prompting some Democrats to look hopefully toward a new trend, and to a retreat from a reflexive embrace of the still-unpopular Republican Party.
"There have been a slew of polls in the last few days showing substantial movement toward the Democrats and away from the Republicans," Simon Rosenberg, the founder of the Democratic strategy outfit NDN. "There is a substantial new dynamic. The idea that this is baked in the cake is just wrong," he said.
Rosenberg wrote yesterday that "no one should be suprised. The underlining favorability of the Republican Party is still far below that of the Dems and Obama. This election has never been like 1994 where at this point there had been both a fall of the Dems and a rise in the GOP. The memory of the disasterous GOP reign in the last decade is still too fresh, their leaders still to unreformed, their candidates far too wacky, and their ideas still to reckless for the current GOP to have fully taken advantage of the Democratic underpeformance this past cycle."
I've also been hearing scraps of anecdotal evidence to this effect this week.
"I had a couple of independents tonight tell me that the GOP had gone too far," one local candidate who'd been knocking on doors in the Mid-Atlantic told me yesterday. "First time I've heard it."
But Rosenberg may be overstating the evidence. He finds particularly dramatic polling evidence by dropping Rasmussen from his averages on the grounds that it's an outlier; but averaging is usually the way to absorb outliers. Still, just yesterday a new Zogby poll found a seven point swing toward the Democrats in the last week, and 11 point swing for Obama in the last month.
This morning I asked Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who was among the first to spot the shift among independents last year, what he made of those claims.
"There's a little tightening in the generic ballot, with what was a four or five point lead becoming a two point lead," Ayres said.
But he said he'd seen no change in the long-term trend, and -- cruciallly -- "no change in intensity," which means that even a tied generic ballot would, in practice, favor Republicans.
