A belated but not forgotten response...
I'm one hell of a lot more impartial and honest than you are BHD. And more accurate in this prediction, matter-of-fact: The public support for the democratic party *has* collapsed.
Gone are the double digit favorables over the opposition party that brought the dems to power last year --and in 2006. Ditto Obama's public ratings. Address *that* why doncha? All I ever hear is some variation on "the ghost of George Bush". Hate to tell ya, but that pony has been back in the barn for sometime now...
You're impartial? You call yourself an anarchist!
I don't think you hear me harping about Bush in 2009. The only reason I've brought him up in this context is because the Republican leadership in Congress
is running on the exact same ideas they had when they ran Congress during his presidency. I don't see that agenda getting a lot of traction with voters.
Obama's ratings are still very strong considering that we have 10% unemployment and the Republicans have been running a non-stop, campaign-strength opposition campaign to every freaking thing he does . I brought this up with someone on SBN last month but it bears repeating - Obama's personal approval and job approval are ten points higher than Reagan's (in the same Gallup daily tracking poll) when RR had 10% unemployment in his first term. As I recall, Reagan didn't do too badly with Congress after the '82 midterms or in his '84 campaign.
Did Congressional Democrats have a "double digit" edge going into 2006 and 2008? Nope.
Look back at the results leading up to last year's election - the job approval for Congress is actually running about ten points higher
today than it was in the summer and fall of 2008. (Which, now that I think about it, had you predicting Dem losses in Congress, right?)
Has public support for the Democratic party collapsed? Again, the polling results point to a
resounding no. Party ID for Democrats today by a composite of all public polls (including Rassmussen) is almost exactly where it was in September of 2008, while Republican support has fallen by almost 25%. Democrats also retain an edge among
registered and likely voters in party ID, and have gained since last September. (Republicans have gained among registered and likely voters, too, but they still trail Dems overall.)
I'm not aware of any precedent for a party regaining control of Congress when it's losing support among the American people. Democrats opened up a double-digit lead in party ID before the 2006 elections, and Republicans pulled even with Dems for the first time in decades in the two years before the Contract
On With America in 1994. Party ID is a leading indictator of where Congressional elections are going, and so far it's not going anywhere for the R's in 2010.
Tell us what's gonna change PO between now and next fall... with virtually every soul associated with the economic world seeing nothing but sustained high unemployment and "pain on mainstreet" through 2010. (accompanied by fatter fatcats and national debt doing a good imitation of a Saturn V launch...)
Passing the health care "reform"-- think that'll do it? 67% of the electorate polls as viewing passage of *any* healthcare reform bill as resulting in
no improvement over their present situation-- with the majority of those polling "worse". (gallup, Nov. 8th). Yeh, that'll get lotsa votes.
How about the wars? The economy? Environment? Deficit? Energy? Taxes? Immigration? Unemployment?
Unemployment is going to be the key. If it is still in the high nines-low tens after Labor Day, the Dems are in serious trouble regardless of what else happens. But if it peaks in the spring or and shows steady decline through the summer, I don't think it will be something the Republicans can get a lot of mileage from. Between those two scenarios we've got a horserace.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss a stock market rebound as only making the fat cats fatter. Everyone who has a 401k has a vested interest in seeing the market rebound. About the actual fat cats, it's way too early to declare victory but the financial reform bills coming out of the House and Senate in the last couple of weeks are a big step in the right direction, and it's going to be a wedge issue to split the public from the anti-regulation Republicans.
About health care reform - yeah, two-thirds don't think it will affect them and they're right as long as they keep their job, but they're still very concerned about exploding costs, denial of treatment, and losing coverage if they lose their job. Look at those numbers from the AP/Roper poll you liked to below - sixty seven percent say it won't affect them regardless of what Congress does or doesn't do, but 78% call health care a very important or extremely important issue.
And they're not buying what the Republicans are trying to sell. You can see this when the public is polled on Obama v. Congressional R's on an issue. In a
late October NBC/WSJ poll, Obama only got a 43% approval for his health care plan, but the approval rating for Republicans was at a base-only level of 23%. Another poll, this one from ABC in mid October. Forty-nine percent trust Obama on the economy, and nineteen percent trust the Republicans in Congress.
These kind of direct R/D questions aren't appearing frequently yet, but you'll see a lot more of them in the coming year and from what I see so far, it looks a lot better for the Democrats than the Republicans.
All of that said, there are still some big landmines the Dems could run into. The big one, I think, is ethics. They need to get their shit together quickly on messes like Rangel and Murtha or the R's will get a lot of mileage out of it next fall.
The Dems and the WH also need to greatly improve how they are communicating with and managing their base. They've created a lot of unnecessary grief for themselves over the last year because they cut the base out of early conversations and, in some cases, tried to cut them off at the knees altogether. They also need to keep the conservative Dems from blocking progress on all the things they said they would do. That's going to be an ongoing problem and it won't break my heart if they lose some of those seats next fall. If there are two dozen fewer Stupak's and Nelson's in Congress next December, that would be just fine by me.
The latest edition of the monthly AP polls tracking the public perception of the Obama admin's handling of all these issues show a sum double digit drop/rise in approval/disapproval since this spring in
every single category. *Including* the category "Relationships with other countries". (Ouch, that's gotta hurt!) Show us some democratic highlights in
this data...
Now all this has nothing to do with questions of the innate right wrong or otherwise of any of these policies-- it has to do with
public support--which, in a political system like ours happens to factor into the future life of these policies and the future power of the party which represents them (regardless of innate policy rights or wrongs).
The answer for the drop in Obama's numbers compared to last spring can be explained in four words: The honeymoon is over. Happens to every administration, and the fall was going to be fairly sharp for Obama given the wave he was riding and the problems he was facing.
But I broke this up into a separate answer because there was something fascinating in that AP poll that I think you overlooked. Look at the importance people give to every issue the pollster asks about. Every single issue is rated very or extremely important by over 50% of the respondents, and over half are rated very or extremely important by >70% of the respondents.
That in itself is not terribly unusual. This type of question always elicits a very high percentage of people who think most of the issues are very important. When you poll on priorities, an issue that gets sixty percent support as very or extremely important will finish dead last when you ask what is the single most important issue facing the country.
But it is a reminder that a large percentage of voters expect something to be done about these things they say are very or extremely important. In this Congress, one party is proposing solutions and the other is not. That will matter when it's time to vote next November.
And it gets to the last part of this long post.
The question is this: what can the dems do to reclaim public support for their increasingly unpopular policies? *Hope* for miraculous developments? (like the repubs somehow
reversing their steadily increasing popularity?) Or is the "plan" just plugging your ears and saying NANANANANA real loud until you're the minority party under a repub admin again?
In a two party system, if one party loses public confidence, guess what? The *other* party gets the votes--as protest or whatever, the result is the same--losses for the party of "no confidence". It doesn't even matter that the opposition may be a collection of "nuts"--they are the only alternative to an unpopular staus quo.
Simply put, there is no historical reference to support what you're claiming. None.
In this two-party system, no one has ever won by simply opposing whatever the other party wanted to do. Truman faced a Republican-controlled Congress behaving very similarly to the way McConnell and Boehner are acting today. HST attacked them as the "do-nothing Congress" and kept them in session over the summer of 1948 to expose them as the empty suits they were. The Dems retook control of Congress and Truman won the biggest presidential election upset ever that November. (Don't be surprised if you see a revival of that tactic next summer...)
Democrats in Congress were hugely unpopular for the entire decade of the 80's, but the R's didn't win control until Gingrich put together a viable alternative to what the Dems were doing. It was the same three years ago, when the Dems finally built a platform that was a clear alternative to what the GOP had become in the Bush era. And both succeeded because they were able to keep the base and win moderates.
That last part is a trick the Republicans can't pull off today, and I think it's going to be their fatal flaw in every election until they find a way to reach moderates and keep the base. But for now, they're rushing even further to the right. As bad as you think the record of the Dems has been - do you seriously think the Republicans have a better platform to run on with their
comical budget and
joke disguised as health care reform? And as I mentioned earlier, there is no evidence in polling that the Republicans have shown "steadily increasing popularity". They have succeeded in pulling down the numbers for the Congressional Dems, but theirs are still worse and in every poll except Rassmussen, they're lag behind Obama by a factor of 2:1 or more when polled about trust on specific issues.
I'm not ready to say the Dems have a lock on 2010, but the Republicans have a long, long way to go if they hope to make any real gains.