A Democratic surge?

Polls are what they are – snapshots in time with value dependent upon a variety of factors. They can tell us a lot, or they can tell us nothing.

Trouble is most of the time there’s a fine line between them telling us a lot or nothing, and we’re usually not aware of the distinction until after the fact.

Case in point: Recent polls by Public Policy Polling and Gallup measuring voter attitudes toward Congress on a generic congressional ballot. PPP measures a 43 percent-to-43 percent dead heat in voter preferences between Democrats and Republicans. Gallup, for its part, has Democrats surging ahead of Republicans by a 49 percent-to-43 percent margin.

Your take on this: Likely it’s based on where you are politically. If red is your political color of choice, well, then, Gallup is obviously part of some liberal-media conspiracy to make Republicans look bad. If blue is you, then you’re thinking something along the lines of, Doesn’t PPP do push-button polls, and aren’t push-button polls flawed because …

Let’s look inside the numbers for some meat, shall we? PPP has Republicans winning among self-ID’d independent voters 38-31; Gallup has Republicans winning independents 43-39. OK, that’s consistent, by and large. And both polling organizations have intraparty support at high levels – in the high 80s in the Public Policy Polling snapshot, and in the low 90s in Gallup. And both measure Republican voters as being much more excited about voting in November than Democratic voters are, and thus not surprisingly have Republican candidates leading significantly among the excited-voter subset as a result.

Interesting observation on that point from PPP director Tom Jensen: “As I’ve said before, unexcited voters count the same as excited ones, and our polling so far this cycle has suggested the Democrats who answer our surveys vote, whether they’re excited about it or not. So I’m not sure how much the wide GOP advantage with ‘very excited’ voters really matters.”

One other observation of Jensen that is salient here has to do with the GOP’s apparent inability to strike a resonant chord with voters who are dissatisfied with the current course in Washington. The recent PPP polling has only 33 percent of voters saying they approve of the job being done by congressional Democrats, with 57 percent disapproving, but the numbers for Republicans are actually worse, with 20 percent of voters approving of the job being done by congressional Republicans and 60 percent disapproving.

“If anything mitigates Democratic losses this fall, it will be the inability of the Republicans to cast themselves as a viable alternative,” Jensen said.

Final observation, this time from me, on summertime political polls – they’re summertime political polls. Which means they’re good for those of us who like to muse on politics topics year-round, but the value is the same as the value of throwing around Vegas odds on the big football game scheduled for Sunday night on Monday afternoon.

Related posts:

1. Even more fun with numbers
2. Fun with numbers