Generic Ballot

The numbers don't have any real predictive value this far in advance, but with generic congressional ballot polling tilting this sharply against the GOP you can see that Republicans really need something to change fairly drastically if they want to avoid serious problems. Whatever improvements one may think have taken place in Iraq clearly haven't turned public opinion around. Meanwhile, I'd say the odds strongly favor the Iraq violence situation and the economic situation both looking worse in six months

Comments

It's a given Bush will arrange for a "terrorist" attack on a significant domestic target. It will be portrayed as having happened due to the Democrats and their collusion with the forces of darkness. Should be good for a twenty point swing in the electorate considering the quivering idiocy that defines our citizenry.

Posted by steve duncan | February 16, 2008 9:35 AM

Steve,

I sincerely hope you're joking... I certainly wouldn't put it past Bush & Co. to opportunistically raise the specter of an imminent terrorist attack, or, in the horrible situation of an actual terror attack on the US or an ally, try to use it to their electoral advantage, because they have done that many times already.

But come on. I really have no patience for people who honestly think Bush would orchestrate an attack on the US. As much as I don't like the guy, I don't think he would ever consider anything like that. Nor do I actually think such a feat is as easily accomplished as the tin-foil hat crowd seems to think it is. (And, if you're a full-on 9/11 conspiracy theorist, forget I said anything; there's no use arguing with you people.)

Posted by Philly | February 16, 2008 9:50 AM

I hope steve duncan is wrong. Bush's hissy fit on FISA didn't induce the effect it might have had three years ago. Maybe we've figured out that at best the GOP has no idea of what is going on.

No predictions on House races, but republicans have already made drastic changes. 29 incumbent GOPers have declined to run and at least one (Gilchrest in MD) was beaten by a right winger in a democratic majority district. Of course this is not a way to "avoid serious problems."

Posted by Peter Driscoll | February 16, 2008 9:54 AM

Okay, I think even if Bush were that malevolent the backlash would be on him as the Protector of America, not the Democrats who let the whatever bill expire. Paranoid for suggesting Bush would do it, doubly paranoid for assuming the Dems would come off worse in the eyes of public opinion.

Posted by Bill | February 16, 2008 9:57 AM

"with generic congressional ballot polling tilting this sharply against the GOP you can see that Republicans really need something to change fairly drastically if they want to avoid serious problems."

Of course, Republicans have trailed in generic Congressional balloting prior to almost every election for the past 75 years...

Posted by Petey | February 16, 2008 9:58 AM

Given the propensity that Congressional Democrats have, when push comes to shove, of actually supporting GOP positions ( "bipartisanship" and all that ) I fail to understand what this information actually signifies.

Posted by Duncan Kinder | February 16, 2008 9:59 AM

No attacks will be orchestrated of course, but how about some good old fashion color-coded TERROR ALERT fun!

That whole scheme seems to have disapeared like the anthrax scare (has the terror threat level really been exactly the same for the past few years?), but I would imagine a return around the time of the GOP convention may be in order.

In terms of congressional politics, I'd love to see some polling on freshman in GOP-leaning areas such as Shuler. If the Repubs are still doing as poorly in those areas as in 2006, we may be in for a bloodbath. One hopes.

Posted by Andruw | February 16, 2008 10:03 AM

"Bush's hissy fit on FISA didn't induce the effect it might have had three years ago. Maybe we've figured out that at best the GOP has no idea of what is going on."

Or maybe we just hold more seats than we did three years ago.

Posted by Petey | February 16, 2008 10:08 AM

Of course, Republicans have trailed in generic Congressional balloting prior to almost every election for the past 75 years...

Gallup has recent data on its generic polling.

At no point in their 2002 or 2004 balloting were the Democrats even close to 14-point leaders. (in 2004, they were down 5 at the same point.)

The generic numbers resemble the generic numbers from 2006, and do not resemble the generic numbers from 2002 or 2004.

Posted by DivGuy | February 16, 2008 10:18 AM

OBviously, it's just one poll. There was a poll in Sept '06 that showed the two parties tied, so a lot of shit can happen either to the poll or to the attitudes the poll wishes to test.

But a 14-point lead in generic balloting has not been a common occurence, except in the lead-up to a Democratic avalanche. Insofar as it's evidence, it's evidence of what Matt says it's evidence of.

Posted by DivGuy | February 16, 2008 10:22 AM

Does anyone *really* think Bush and his people are competent enough to stage a terrorist attack?

Frankly, if the Bush Administration were competent enough to do something like that, then they'd probably be in a political position where they didn't need to do something like that.

Or were all the endless series of Bush disasters just meant to lure us into a false sense of security, just like they deliberately---and unexpectedly---lost control of both houses of Congress after all those years in order to make the Democrats overconfident...

Posted by RKU | February 16, 2008 10:22 AM

Steve Duncan may or may not be joking, but recall that the administration did raise the terror alert immediately after the Democratic convention in 2004.
Which did take away any post convention bounce and media coverage. Clinton in '92 and '96 had very effective convention follow-up tours.

Posted by Mike | February 16, 2008 10:23 AM

Or maybe we just hold more seats than we did three years ago. Petey has recovered! The extra seats haven't helped beat the right wing all that much. I just think 65% of the USA believes the GOP is wrong almost all the time. Even McConnell couldn't scare anyone yesterday with the ultimate terror attack, the "plaintiff's bar" terminating the existence of ATT and Verizon. 8 months is a long time, but Matt is correct that a bad economy and a mess in Iraq are more likely than a terror attack that we can't handle.

Posted by Peter Driscoll | February 16, 2008 10:25 AM

Meanwhile, I'd say the odds strongly favor the Iraq violence situation and the economic situation both looking worse in six months.

Exactly. One of the recent themes that Obama has been playing with is: tie the economy to the war in Iraq. Of all strategies to pull the troops out of Iraq, a solution devoutly to be wished, this is the one real winner. It is also the one the warmonger crowd among the media is most afraid of - hence, the silence about polls showing that people are quite seriously pissed about the amount of money being spent in Iraq.

The reality goes something like this: the timeline of the Iraq war reflects exactly its nature as a project concocted by idiots and exploited by criminals. Projected to cost 10 billion dollars by Wolfowitz, its real costs have gone up exponentially every year - so much for any analogy to occupations of Germany or stationing soldiers in Korea. Those costs have a real relationship to the amount of force the U.S. can exert. If they go down, the situation for the U.S. in Iraq doesn't change linearly, but non-linearly - we are completely dependent on high tech, expensive tactics to keep the level of U.S. casualties down. If the casualties go way up as funding goes down, it produces a vicious circle, in which the war becomes more unpopular (producing more casualties in its fifth and sixth year), the pressure to reduce spending on it becomes greater, and the risks to soldiers in Iraq due to those spending cuts become greater. Which means - withdrawal. The warmongers have shot their wad. They did it long ago. Careless of trying to wage a war instead of scoring political points and spreading military money around in big, honied chunks, they enabled an administration visibly incapable of planning a children's picnic in perhaps the grossest mismanagement of an American war ever.

If Obama keeps pulling on this string, the fabric is going to unravel quickly. So excellent!

Posted by roger | February 16, 2008 10:33 AM

at least one (Gilchrest in MD) was beaten by a right winger in a democratic majority district

MD-01 went 62% for Bush in 2004. It's a very Republican district. Democrats have a severely uphill battle to win it, even if the opponent is a wingnut rather than one of the rare (and getting rarer all the time) reasonable Republicans.

Posted by KCinDC | February 16, 2008 10:35 AM

I don't believe the Republicans will be staging terrorist attacks, but I do think they're consulting Karl Rove about the best schedule for the Guantanamo show trials.

Posted by KCinDC | February 16, 2008 10:40 AM

It seems to me like we always have great stats far out from an election that end up closing up as the election draws closer.

I'd like to see a study of whether there's a pattern of the U.S. electorate getting more liberal in-between elections and then growing more conservative as elections approach, even if the explanation is only the pedestrian one that the conservatives effectively get their scare-mongering or message out through the media around election-time, and then when people have more time to think about the issues without being subjected to conservative appeals made directly to them, they gain a more liberal perspective.

Posted by Swan | February 16, 2008 10:45 AM

Anyway, we can't rest on our laurels.

When we read about stats like this, the thing to do is to view it as momentum that's to be made the most of, not a lift we can count us on to see us through an election succesfully, no matter what the Republicans try to get around it.

Posted by Swan | February 16, 2008 10:48 AM

I think some of you give Bush too much credit.

At this point, the burden of proof is on those who say that bush WON'T do something horrible and undemocratic. A false flag operation is entirely within what these people view as morally acceptable.

Stop being so naive. Theres nothing these people won't do, and if you think there is, then you're an idiot who clearly hasn't been paying much attention. There's a big difference between what kind of people you wish they were, and what kind of people they really and truly are.

Posted by Soullite | February 16, 2008 10:53 AM

A lot depends on where these polls`were taken. Democrats have close to 55% of the House seats, and most incumbents gets re-elected. If this is taken in the narrow band if 50 seats that are actually competitive it means more than if it were taken nationwide.

Still, it makes me pretty happy.

Posted by SDM | February 16, 2008 11:29 AM

I dispute the conventional wisdom that a terrorist attack would benefit Republicans. They're 0-2 in preventing terrorist attacks in the U.S. during Bush's term (9/11 and anthrax), and 0-2 in punishing the people behind the attacks (until the 9/11 show trials). Why would 0-3 work for them?

Posted by croatoan | February 16, 2008 11:32 AM

Look, there's a gigantic difference between people who are competent at spinning the press, producing nasty political ads or "dirty tricks"---such as Karl Rove and his friends---and people who are competent at doing things that actually impact the real world.

Guantanamo Show Trials, "national terrorist alerts", and lots of "scary" news conferences for CNN are all part of the world of political theater, and we can certainly expect lots of that, just like lots of additional #3 Al-Qaida leaders will be killed during this year. Same for morphing TV attack ads, and also that Obama's-Kenyan-Muslim-relatives-burn-Christians-alive story that Conason wrote about.

But staging an actual, real-life terrorist attack is something entirely different, and requires a totally different set of skills. This I tend to doubt.

But look for lots of Florida-Haitians-caught-plotting-to-explode-the-sun stories...

Posted by RKU | February 16, 2008 11:39 AM

I don't care about recent "progress" in Iraq. It was an enormous boehner and aWol is bleeding the country for it.

Posted by Where's Sally? | February 16, 2008 11:41 AM

I dispute the conventional wisdom that a terrorist attack would benefit Republicans. They're 0-2 in preventing terrorist attacks in the U.S. during Bush's term (9/11 and anthrax), and 0-2 in punishing the people behind the attacks (until the 9/11 show trials). Why would 0-3 work for them?

Your mistake here is that you are using higher brain functioning to rationally evaluate the scenario. In fact, such an attack would activate self-preservation mechanisms in the brainstem, overriding higher brain functioning. It seems to work pretty well.

Posted by Karl Rove | February 16, 2008 11:49 AM

Seems whenever I think I've found the bottom of what this crowd in power will say or do...they find a way to raise (or lower, depending on one's perspective) the bar.

However...they don't need to plan their own terrorist attacks. They didn't make up the fact that there are people who want to kill Americans in the showiest way possible. Not *everything* the wingnuts say is false even if you're usually better off listening to a Magic 8 Ball.

But if they've got it in their heads that the next attack helps them stoke up more fear and resentment (those of us who comfort ourselves that voters will turn out the folks who "failed to protect them" are assuming that these things are governed by rational responses) then, honestly, what's the downside of letting one through? I mean, you can't stop all of 'em, right?

Man do I hope I'm not right.

Posted by Answer Guy | February 16, 2008 11:52 AM

> But come on. I really have no patience for
> people who honestly think Bush would orchestrate
> an attack on the US. As much as I don't like the
> guy, I don't think he would ever consider anything
> like that.

Not Bush. Cheney.

> Look, there's a gigantic difference between
> people who are competent at spinning the press,
> producing nasty political ads or "dirty
> tricks"---such as Karl Rove and his friends---and
> people who are competent at doing things that
> actually impact the real world.

Again, that would be Cheney, Addington, and whoever Addington's equivalent is on Cheney's military/intelligence team (and it is interesting in itself that we don't know who that person is).

Cheney is a strange person who probably has multiple motivations for what he does, but as far as we can see one thing is clear: he truly believes in his heart that the United States is involved in a ragnorak-type conflict in which extreme violence is a necessary component.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | February 16, 2008 11:53 AM

I don't believe the Republicans would (or could) organize a false-flag terrorist attack, but I fully expect that, as in 2004, Osama bin Laden will intervene in the election to help the Republican candidate. Let's hope that he once again confines himself to releasing a campaign commercial rather than doing anything more dramatic.

Posted by KCinDC | February 16, 2008 11:55 AM

Am I the only one that suspects a worsening situation in Iraq between now and November will actually help the Republicans?

The theory goes like this: If things are relatively quiet in Iraq, it stays off the front pages and people focus on the worsening economy and kitchen-table issues, which would help the Dems.

But if things flare up in Iraq, the GOP's inevitable fear-mongering might resonate more, especially with some of their own base voters who right now may be inclined to stay home in November out of frustration with their own party.

Posted by Tractarian | February 16, 2008 11:56 AM

"I don't believe the Republicans would (or could) organize a false-flag terrorist attack, but I fully expect that, as in 2004, Osama bin Laden will intervene in the election to help the Republican candidate."

Osama bin Laden? The guy whose family has deep business and personal ties to the Bush Family?

Posted by Not Really | February 16, 2008 12:13 PM

Aren't most of the single congressional district states red states? Which will make the share in an actual House of Representatives election greater than 41%? And even more so for the Senate?

Posted by Kolohe | February 16, 2008 12:57 PM

Kohole, the single-district states break as follows:

MT - Red state, R rep (Rehberg)
DE - Blue state, R rep (Castle)
WY - Red state, open R seat (Cubin)
AK - Red state, embattled corrupt R rep (Young)
VT - Blue state, D rep (Welch)
ND - Red state, D rep (Pomeroy)
SD - Red state, D rep (Herseth Sandlin)

Just FYI. It isn't a clear distinction.

Posted by SDM | February 16, 2008 2:41 PM

Re: It's a given Bush will arrange for a "terrorist" attack on a significant domestic target.

Wouldn't work, because after all this time, blood and money poured down the Iraq rat-hole the question would be "Why aren't we any safer"? 9-11 came early in Bush's stewardship and could plausibly be blamed on the inattentiveness of Clinton. Now the buck could only stop with Bush. And for an example, consider the surprise defeat of Spanish prime minister Aznar after the 3-11 terror attacks in Madrid.

Re: At this point, the burden of proof is on those who say that Bush WON'T do something horrible and undemocratic.

Uh-uh. The burden of proof is always on people making positive assertions.

Re: There's nothing these people won't do

Even if that's true, it's also true that there's very little these people can do competently. Why did they lose Congress in '06 if they are such Machiavellian geniuses?

Posted by JonF | February 16, 2008 8:42 PM