Oct 26 2010
An “Oh … My … God!” Poll In VA
OK, I have been watching Democrats fall like dominoes all over the place with a distant pleasure. But it is not until you see a big one fall near your home before you actually feel the rumble of that tsunami coming down in your bones:
A dramatic reversal of fortune in Virginia’s 9th Congressional District, where Republican challenger Morgan Griffith appears to have awoken after 3 months of polling at 40% and today, 7 days until votes are counted, vaults into a tie with incumbent Democrat Rick Boucher, who had been sailing to a 16th term.
In a SurveyUSA polling conducted exclusively for WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, it’s Griffith 47%, Boucher 46%, within the survey’s theoretical margin of sampling error. Griffith’s lead may or may not be statistically significant; the contest should be reported as even.
Boucher is one of two Dems I had concluded would survive this wave (the other being Jim Moron Moran). As a long time conservative democrat I just could not see the wave hitting him. Apparently I was wrong. Boucher is right at the 45% death point for incumbents.
Not until this poll did I realize this wave is bloody enormous. It is definitely Hulk time!
Well, one lefty pundit did say recently the Demofrauds should purge all the blue dogs from the party. They may get their wish.
Hey, Perry just got a moneybomb yesterday. He has raised far more money than White has since August. And that includes Houston! Yay!
White and Perry are now fighting over whether they did or did not do enough to fight illegal immigration. The problem is that White allowed Houston to become a sanctuary city. White claims that Perry did not do enough to convince Obama to increase funds and help in fighting our own borders.
Heck, didn’t Obama or Nappy cancel the virtual border control project?
It still bothers me that California, which accounts for 10% of the country’s population, appears to be lost. On the other hand, given that the state faces total financial collapse over the next couple of years as all the housing and pension bombs built into the system go off, it is probably justice to make the democrats own the scorched economic wasteland that is California’s future.
Anyone who lives there had better learn how to get on good terms with Lord Humongous.
important economic background material:
http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3540/26/
On a sales call this morning an 84 year old lady and her daughter in law were telling me how Gore got ripped off in FLA 2000.
AND how no SSI increase for two years now. Asked them if they were going to vote and they both said already did straight R except our Governor race they voted for the incumbant Dem over the former 4 term Repub challanger.
Do any of the polls, the enthusiam counters, factor in Dems going R as they are pissed off as the rest of us are?
Both said we cannot afford these clowns any longer and they would like to be able to vote themselves raises like the Congress Critters did.
“Do any of the polls, the enthusiam counters, factor in Dems going R as they are pissed off as the rest of us are?”
Only one, Dhunter. The one we learn the results of one week from tonight!
I will say it again….the “tea partiers” said they were not going to disclose who they were voting for in any polls. They were not going to let the talking heads know how big the land slide was going to be so that they couldn’t defend against it. Doesn’t it make you want to just LAUGH OUT LOUD?
Dhunter,
Polls supposedly do factor in cross overs. Early voting does not. Right now all the Dems are saying they will vote Dem by 95-5%.
I ain’t buying that one. I think the surprise is how 30% of the Dems defect and raise the wave to frightening levels.
AJ,
Based on those two seniors this morning I have to believe there are a ton of pissed off Dems if for no other reason than they did not get their SSI increase. They also mentioned the healthScare fiasco and how it will cost them MORE!
I’m in Moran’s district (8th), unfortunately. I’ll vote against him, FWIW. Nice to hear at least one long term Dem might go down in VA.
I’m a classic liberal Dem who woke up. 🙂
AJ,
I’ve been soaking up as much as I can take from RCP, Powerline, RedState, Belmont Club, NRO, Nate Silver, etc…..
I’m not an analyst, but when the young’un running the check-out line at my local Home Depot tells me he can see 2012 from his kitchen window (not 2010, but 2012!)…. when the ladies at the office (nominal Catholics) are sending ME emails pointing out Dem excesses…. I could go on, but it would be a waste of time, since everyone one of you reading this is seeing the same thing where you are – there’s a wave coming like NO ONE has ever seen, and there’s nothing, no matter the October Surprise(s), that can stop it. It’s baked into this cake, and is absolutely brimming with energy. Have no fear of talking about it – we can’t jinx this, since no one who feels this energy is gonna stay home on Nov 2nd.
The wave is coming, and we will all be shocked by the end of the night just who gets ripped up by the roots on account of the power of that wave…
Hang on, people! Go vote! And stock up on popcorn!
Triton
“Do any of the polls, the enthusiam counters, factor in Dems going R as they are pissed off as the rest of us are?”
I’m with AJ. I’m willing to bet that a lot of the early voting Democrats are in fact tea party Dems voting out their pals in Washington DC…
From my 72 year old body… (and… yes… I gamed the system by paying BACK 100% of the benefits I had received when I reached age 70 and then re-applying … If you know anyone that age… check it out ) (Incredibly stupid policy by my government… but nice+ and I”m talking about $$$$+ over time for me and my wife)
.
#1… Without this… no reform is possible…
Prohibit SS funds from being used for ANY other thing except
social security payments…
.
Freeze payment for any recipient whose taxable income tax is
over … say … $50,000… for 7 years …(some reasonable $)
.
Raise min age ONE year…
.
Raise contribution 1% for anyone whose taxable federal income tax is more than $50,000…
.
Raise the limit from the present $106,800 to … say… $5,000,000…
.
NOTHING … repeat … NONE OF THE ABOVE or anything else will save
the system for you youngsters if #1 above is not adopted…
.
I think we seniors are more willing than you think to take to take some hits but it has to be meaningful … NOT the usual Cr*p that politicians dream up …
Talking about social security benefits above if it’s not clear …
To see how the sizable Hillary democrats are thinking and what are they doing, go to hillbuzz.com and hillaryis44.com.
They could not be more pissed at the Obama demsheviks and are working like possessed devils to defeat any dimocrat as they put it.
AJ:
Calm down and take a deep breath. 30% is way too high. Be happy with 15%.
It all depends on the race and the location, but I would not be surprised to see the Dems only vote to 90% for their candidate and 85% may be the new normal with some only receiving 80% from their own party.
Maybe in WV, Manchin only gets 70% of the dem vote. But count me shocked if that happens. In fact if it does, I’ll down an Irish Car Bomb just to celebrate.
http://hillbuzz.org/2010/10/26/democrats-at-defcon-1-is-christine-odonnell-now-leading-in-internals/
From Hillbuzz early voting Dems are voting Republican and ODonnell may be winning DE.
Jives with what my real world little old ladies told me this morning. Even dems are afraid for their medicare and SSI as well they should be!
“…O’Donnell may be winning DE…”
Whoa! If that is even remotely true, this is going to be a tsunami for the ages!!
If the article from Hillbuzz is correct this is definitely going to be a history making election. This is what we need though. To show the politicians that even though we send them to Washington and give them a pretty loose lease, that lease is still there and can be tightened. Read the Constitution, the People will always win!
AJ,
I think that all the poll models you are using are broken due to a single fact. They assume registered Democrats are going to vote between 8.5 & 9-to-1 for Democrats.
The floor for Democrats absolutely falls out on election day — along with all the polling models that are predicting the 40 to 60 house seat and eight senate seat losses for Democrats — if the actual Democratic voter split goes from 9-to-1 Democrat to a 75% to 25% Democratic split.
There are some very strong grounds to think Democrats are not going to get that 9-to-1 split this election.
That Hillbuzz link in dhunter’s comment and today’s Jay Cost post about Obama’s unsustainable racial election strategy has me suspecting very strongly that a lot of the Democratic voters we are seeing in the early voting are more like white Jacksonian West Virginia Democrats than the 8.5 or 9-to-1 vote for Democratic candidate general election voters of the 1996-2008 election cycles.
I think the Democratic voting assumptions built into the poll models are going to suffer >epic failure< in the following four part harmony.
1) The Economy — Democrats still get a lot of votes from the working class, a plurality who are unionized, that have taken it in the neck from the poor economy. We have never has 15 months of 9% to 17% plus (depending on how you measure it) unemployment before a mid-term election. They have called the “Great Recession” a “Mancession” for a reason. The biggest voting block impacted here are the working class white males and their non-college educated “Walmart mom” wives.
An indicator here will be closer male/female gender splits in the polls in working class House districts and states.
2) Gentry Class Environmental Policies — The Obama Administration has gone after the good paying non-college degree coal and oil jobs with both Cap & Trade carbon taxing and the off-shore oil drilling ban in the worst employment environment since the Great Depression.
Democrats will do much worse in the energy states — Coal country from WVA, VA, Penn, to Ohio and the Texas to Florida Gulf Coast — than polls indicate.
3) The Jacksonian Democrat Hillary voters — These people are already in the habit of voting against Obama. Some of them voted for him in against McCain in 2008, and have regretted it ever since.
This 2009 Michael Barone article:
http://www.theabsurdreport.com/2009/a-jacksonian-republican-sweep-by-michael-barone/
Arkansas 2 is part of what I call the Jacksonian belt, the swath of counties from southwestern Pennsylvania along the Appalachian chain and extending to Oklahoma and Texas which were largely settled by the Scots-Irish immigrants that streamed into America in the dozen years before the Revolution and their descendants. Their great hero, and the son of Scots-Irish immigrants himself, was Andrew Jackson, the victor of Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans, who set about removing Indians from much of this territory and was the founder of the Democratic party. In 2008 voters in the Jacksonian belt voted heavily against Barack Obama in both the Democratic primaries and the general election, as you can see on these national maps (http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/) and by clicking on individual states to see the county-by-county returns. This map (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/11/05/us/politics/20081104_ELECTION_RECAP.html) showing the counties which cast a higher percentage of votes for John McCain in 2008 than for George W. Bush in 2004 is essentially a map of the Jacksonian belt.
If Vic Snyder is in trouble, it’s a good bet that many other Democrats from the Jacksonian belt are too.
And this April 14, 2010 article (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/04/14/how_bad_could_2010_really_get_for_democrats_105152.html) by Sean Trende gives you a good idea what is happening with the Jacksonians:
Analysts also fail to appreciate the damage that Obama has done to the brand that allowed the Democrats to stay competitive in Congress during the 1990s, and win it in the 2000s. As I detailed last November, Bill Clinton’s rebranding of the Democratic Party as a more libertarian party – culturally cosmopolitan and antipathetic toward the religious right, fiscally conservative and supportive of balanced budgets – allowed him to take what remained of the Party’s historic Democratic base among Jacksonians and the white working class, keep minorities and white liberals, and then add on Northern suburbanites and voters in the Mountain West.
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This brand filtered down to the Congressional level, where Democratic candidates could wrap themselves in the “New Democrat” label and win in places where Democrats had been losing ground. Today there are well over a hundred Democrats in these Mountain West/Jacksonian/northern Suburban/working class districts. This includes, by my count, about fifty such seats that the Democrats won from Republicans between 1996-2006, offsetting Republican gains in the Deep South and rural North and preventing Republicans from amassing big majorities during that time.
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But Obama is shattering that coalition. As Jay Cost and I observed in early 2009, Obama lost the “Jacksonians” before he was even elected As I noted in my November piece on the Clinton coalition, the 2009 gubernatorial elections indicated that the Jacksonians are continuing to abandon the Democrats, both up and down the ticket.
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and
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President Obama’s policy choices to date are wreaking havoc on the brand that Democrats cultivated carefully over the past twenty years. Bill Clinton worked long and hard to make it so that voters could say “fiscal conservative” and “Democrat” in the same sentence, but voters are finding it difficult to say that again.
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If brand damage is truly seeping over into Congressional races – and the polling suggests it is – then the Democrats are in very, very deep trouble this election. There is a very real risk that they could be left with nothing more than Obama’s base among young, liberal, and minority voters, which is packed into relatively few Congressional districts. It would be the Dukakis map transformed onto the Congressional level, minus the support in Appalachia. That would surely result in the Democratic caucus suffering huge losses, and in turn produce historic gains for the GOP this November.
If you take those national county election results maps and the Dukakis presidential election return map, then do a Dan Rather National Guard hand writing, Little Green Footballs style, image fade of one map over the other to scale. You will see the “Hulk is Angry” voting pattern of this year’s election.
4) The Federalized Healthcare Perfect Storm — It is difficult to imagine a better wedge issue to divide the Democratic party from elderly voters than Obamacare.
Leftists in the Media and Democratic Party are completely oblivious to this until their faces are rubbed it in, thereby demonstrating that this wedge issue between the Left and the elderly is outside the former’s frame of reference.
Obamacare as passed is designed to destroy private medical issuance in order to bring about Canadian style government single-payer healthcare.
The Democratic problem here is that the party overall has devoted more than 20 years of effort into single-payer in terms of study, think-tanks, candidate development, etc. I.e., the Democratic party overall simply cannot back away from this one, however much individual candidates, even most of them, might want to.
The Democrats have invested too much into single-payer for them to abandon it.
This is a self-identification issue.
In terms of political effects, though, it’s their tar baby. They can’t let go of it and will keep pushing it long after it is politically hopeless. Plus their continued pushing of it will remind senior voters with money that the Democrats threaten the seniors’ survival interests.
It looks like a perfect storm, politically.
Access to private health insurance is a personal survival issue for a lot of people with both time and more importantly money.
A lot of money.
“Those people” are called retiring and soon to retire baby boomers.
And did I mention the money?
The Democrats and the Left as groups (they are two distinctly different groups, but will be less so after Nov 2010 and 2012) simply cannot accept that single payer is such a wedge issue because they’ve made it an identity issue for themselves.
The Left will IMO never get past this. The Democrats will, but that will take at least a generation, and possibly two generations, at which point the country’s demographics will have changed so much as to possibly defuse the issue, i.e., after all the Boomers die.
But it is possible for the GOP nationally to be Palestinian-stupid about this. The California GOP sure is. IMO that is the Democrats’ only hope here – for the opposition to bungle.
The problem with that thought is the Tea Party movement, people who previously had not been politically active, but are now. This presents an opportunity for some of the younger GOP elected officials to get in front of the wave here, put into words what is in the hearts and minds of the newly politically aware/active, and ride it into the White House.
My personal anecdote here is from when I visited my then 69 year old parents in early August 2009 and they thought then that Obama wanted to send them to a hospice to die in order to save the government health care spending. My father proudly showed me his letter to the CEO of AARP removing himself from the organization along with his cut up AARP card.
I thought they were going a little far until I started hearing the same thing on talk radio shows — Sean Hannity in this case — where 60 something callers were referring to Obamacare as “genocide for the elderly.”
If anything, my folks were reasonable compared to what has been brewing out there since.
The Tea Party movement is just the visible part of the iceberg here. The invisible part is the fact that we are now in our second year of no Social Security cost of living increases.
Medical costs have gone up something like 15% since 2008 and social security has not. The fixed income, retired, working class elderly are hurting a lot.
In addition, Obamacare has forced many cardiac and other medical specialists to post at their practices that they are no longer talking any new Medicare/Medicare patients.
Late 50’s to early 70’s Democratic voters with private health insurance or living on Social Security are going to take this out on Democratic office holders because Obama is not on the ticket.
This fact, more than anything else about the mid-term, will be the election day surprise for Democrats.
Trent,
No, you missed the point. I do NOT think the Dems will hold their base. And I showed how even a small loss of 15% can turn this into a blow out. I was quite clear that the hidden factor in the wave would be centrist democrats (half the base) defecting.