Dems lead Reps by a larger margin than when R captured the House in '94!!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5284936

<snip>
The poll found the president's approval rating at 39 percent. Of the 58 percent of respondents who said they disapprove, a whopping 45 percent "disapprove strongly."

When asked what pollsters call the generic ballot question -- "If the election were held today, would you vote for the Democrat or the Republican candidate?" -- those surveyed favored Democrats by one of the largest margins in decades, 52 percent to 37 percent. (That's a bigger margin than Republicans enjoyed just before they captured the House in 1994).

<snip>
But in this poll, when asked which party they trust more on issues such as the Iraq war, foreign ownership of U.S. ports and attention to homeland security, majorities chose the Democrats. Only on the question of Iranian nuclear weapons do the president and his party come out ahead.

<snip>
"One clear piece of evidence in the data is that Republicans benefited by showing some independence from the president on the ports deal," Bolger says. "Democrats have a 16-point advantage over the president in terms of who trust, and only an 8-point advantage over the Republicans on the ports deal. So the Republican Congress' stand of independence cut the Democratic advantage on this issue in half."

Democrats hope the president's low approval ratings will continue to drag his party down."

...the good news just does not stop today, does it!

Do they have their plan on what they must fix immedietly, short term, long term...

They haven't show that they are very good at planning right now....This is my biggest worry!!

Not good for them.

They'll be some spin about a surprise surge of religious voters orsome group that will be unexpected to push things in the Republicans' favor. Just like exit polls on election day, this poll is irrelevant when they count the votes. It is nice to know our fellow citizens are waking up though.

xxxx

Because you know they are trying.

Ohio is a lcear example of it. 2005. the margins were 40-50% and those margins didn't mean squat by the time the election about. Don't be surprised when things don't go as predicted because 48 of the 50 states will be almost entirely electronic voting. The polling companies will simply take all the blame for the anomaly(as did happen last november).

Where they have full control of the count, as they do in Ohio,
they can steal over 30% of the entire count and get away with it.

They did that last Fall in Ohio.

As far as I'm concerned, the Dems have already lost a seat or two in 2006. The votes are registered purely through machine now, and there is no audit that can be attained through them. Nobody should be surprised come November that every poll was off by the amount of points the predicted winner would have.

Republicans got to a 60-to-32 advantage in generic polling on control of Congress in the summer of 1994.

At the ballot box that November the first number didn't win it for them, they had full but not grossly unusual partisan turnout (i.e. ~40% of 1992 voters).

Where the election was decided- lost- was on the Democratic side. Something like 34% of 1992 voters showed up for Democrats, not the usual 38% or so. Those 4-6% that stayed home were the difference.

I think that's the decisive element of midterm elections recently- the variety of normally reliably partisan people who stay home. Every midterm election since at least that of 1990 has meant a control shift (though not majority) from a broken, expended, wing of one Party to an undefeated wing of the other. In the Seventies the liberal Republicans lost power and in the early/mid Eighties the Left wing of Democrats was broken. 1990 the moderate Republicans were finished off, 1994 conservative Democrats were demolished, 1998 conservative Republicans were broken, 2002 moderate Democrats got crushed. Presidential election years only reinforce the patterns set in the previous midterms, imho.

We're now seeing hardline Right Republicans, in power and crashing out of it, likely to keep up the pattern in 2006 (and 2008).

Btw, that's the last wing of the 1968 Nixon GOP coalition to die, and with it discredited that coalition disintegrates. We're closing in on the kind of partisan power shift and political crushing last seen in the early Thirties and late Sixties.