Have a beer a get some sleep.

I'm glad someone is making sense - well done Chris.

All these recent "polls" have one thing in common. They OVER REPRESENT Republicans, and as you mentioned, by a lot.

Which, for me, actually make these polls good news for Democrats. Even while projecting more Republicans voting than Democrats (which friends is not going to happen), the Democrats still poll above 50% and still win by 6%.

I'm not worried about it even in the least. I'm glad this happened now instead of three weeks ago when a widespread Democratic panic may have ensued. But it goes to show just how far up shit creek the Republicans are.

We're going to win. Probably by a lot. Take that to the bank.

I don't know if you've seen their new senates polls, but they're pretty good. All LV by the way.

McCaskill 49, Talent 45

Tester 50, Burns 41

Menendez 50, Kean 40

Whitehouse 48, Chaffee 45

Ford 46, Corker 49

Webb 46, Allen 49 (this is really the only disappointing one)

And with that, we'd be up to 50 seats in the Senate.

I'm worried about the Senate not the House. Republicans didn't give up on holding the house and dump their money into Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia for no reason! If Pew's polling reflected what their own internal polls then they would be dumping a lot more money into House races.

The truth is that they saw they no chance to hold onto their majority in the house and don't want to be wiped out, losing BOTH house and Senate and leaving George Bush cut-off in the White House for the next 2 years.

If they lose the Senate too, it will be the end of their power reign. They won't recover from that even if they win the White House in 2008. So, it's all or nothing. And the all for them is the Senate.

Thus, it makes sense to try and pull out victories in Montana, Rhode Island, Virginia, Missouri, Tennessee and Maryland. If they can win upsets in a couple of these races, they win. And winning means they have a power base in the Congress to thwart any attempt to dismantle the Bush legacy (including the Tax cuts) for the next two years. (Of course Bush has a veto, but that's an entirely negative power, controlling Congress means that Republicans will get to negotiate with Democrats on any bill that gets enacted.

Chris,

Thanks for the breakdown.  The Pew poll smelled fishy.  Still, you are a very optimistic man.  I may be one of only ten progressives out there that do not feel the Dems have made a good enough sale on why they and progressive policies are better than Republicans and conservatism.  

Nor do I trust the Republicans not to cheat, but that is another matter.

Are we more liberal than we were two years ago?  I think on a surface level, yes, but that is because Republican policies have hit up against reality.  What is the alternative to those failed policies?  That is the part of the structure I do not think we have nailed down yet.

Hopefully we get a majority at least in the House, unify our message behind solid progressive principles, nominate an inspiring candidate for 08, strongly oppose Bush's policies so they can fail even more miserably over the next two years, and advance some sort of positive agenda in Congress even with the threat of a Bush veto.

If we do that then we will start permanently shifting the public towards liberalism.

All that being said, I wish your analysis of these polls had been available to the pundits before they started yacking about how things have tightened.

In a couple of threads elsewhere I projected that the D's would be +35 in the House but only +3 in the Senate.  My hunch is that Rove has calculated that it's not looking good for him in the House, so he might as well consolidate his resources and try to win the close Senate races.  The Senate passes judgement on judicial appointments, and with all their other initiatives going belly-up, the Bushniks will probably be content to spend the last two years of Shrub's term packing the judiciary with wingnut judges who will be subservient to the economic interests of the investor/management class.

Thanks Chris, that was wonderful to read.

Whew.  I'm glad I read this.  I'm definitely feeling a little better now.

thanks for spotting it and for the post.

Chris: get some sleep.

You've done everything you can.  I didn't agree with all of it, but the effort was there.  It's time to let go.

Here's the way I go about it:

http://thepremise.com/archives/11/06/200 6/576

Be of good cheer, everyone.

And wake up tomorrow ready to kick some ass.

Much love and y'all rule.

The problem is that Pew's current turnout model suggests a 10% advancement for Republicans on 2004, with 39% of the electorate as conservative (+5%), and 16% of the electorate as liberal (-5%).

Furthermore, 10% changes in the difference between percentages of liberals and conservatives have happened in two years--in fact, they've happened in just one.  But when they have it's been due to a temporary deviation from the long-term trend, probably due to a combination of noise within the MOE and some real movement due to bad news... for conservatives.  Conservatives made a huge gain from 1982 to 1983, over 10%, but that was only because they'd dropped precipitously in 1982--by over 7%--due to a prolonged double-dip recession. Liberals made a gain of just under 10% from 1986 to 1987--after the Iran-Contra scandal became public--but conservatives bounced back by almost 6% in 1988.

These are the only examples of such large shifts since 1974. For there to be such a large shift since 2004, something utterly devastating to liberals' image would have had to happen--like if they'd been responsible for Katrina, Iraq and the rash of Congressional scandals.

In short, this shift is utterly incompatible with the past 30 years of American history.

There also is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Democrats and Republicans have remained at parity since 2004. All evidence indicates just the opposite.

These are Nov. likely voters percentages.

Total 100 40 53 7=100 43 47 10=100 3 (1,795)

Region            R  D Other  change  Number
Northeast  20     40 49 11     6       (337)
Midwest     25     40 51 9     -1       (467)
South       34     48 42 10     7       (651)
West        21     44 47 9      2       (340)

Is it typical for the South to have 34% of the total numbers of voters contacted?  And you will see that in that region the breakdown is 48%R and 42%D. I don't know if that is standard and what the regional breakdown is in other polls.

But the other regions are only in the low to mid 20's.  The population numbers just can't be that the South has more absolute number of voters than the dense Northeast or Midwest.

So while I think this poll does indicate a stiffening of Repub support in this region, the south isn't a region in which we have too many races in contention. Their turnout increase isn't going to impact the 50-60 contested races in the disputed regions of the Northeast, Midwest and the Mountain West.  

If you look at those disputed regions you see that the Dem lead in the Northeast is 49D-40R (decrease from 60-34), Midwest 51-40 (same as Oct!) and the WEst 47-44 (though 52-42 in Oct)

Yes a decline but still big enough leads in the districts and state where we need to win.

I am going to sleep better.

There is a ton of work to be done in the new idea department. This is work that everyone in the country seems to have neglected. Remember the old neocon talking point about the liberals having run out of ideas? (As if 'ideas' were like logs for the old campfire.) So here we are in late 2006, and the neocon's 'new ideas' have devolved into a basic pattern of starting incredibly stupid, but lucrative, wars -- 'awarding' no-bid hundred-billion-dollar war contracts to their corrupt cronies -- then neglecting to collect any taxes from these fattened cronies. That was their 'big idea'!!!

Noam Chomsky rejected the liberal/conservative dichotomy decades ago. Years ago, I did too. About a month ago, even the great duct tape theorist decided it was bullmanure. And this is a guy from Texas who grew up thinking of himself as a conservative.

We clearly need new ways of thinking. The world is changing, not merely too fast, but too strangely. My first idea is that the old notion of a 'checks and balances' republic has gone totally belly up. At least in the near term, we need to invest our trust in the great unwashed, diseducated, distracted Horde. This is part of why I am so adamant about not letting the neocons meddle with, hack, fold, and spindle the voting. I say, let the masses realize that if they let the Karl Roves smash the economy with more wars, etc., the asses of these masses will surely starve and freeze in the dark. That should be enough real 'terror' for them.

under the search term "piehole".

That's the block I always emphasize and look at first in crosstabs. It's the block that determines our fate; recently, now and foreseeable. PEW has white women moving from 55-40 in our favor a month ago, to 46-44 toward Republicans now.

Of course, the 55-40 is absurdly high. That must have been Foley-skewed disgust. We'll make gains among white women but they voted basically 50/50 in 2000, 57% toward the GOP in 2002 (the first signs of 9/11 impact), and 55-44 for Bush in 2004. I'm expecting a small edge in our favor this year.

If you want to pick apart the November PEW sample from October, the entire difference is among white women. White men remained virtually identical, from 49-42 to 51-42 favoring Republicans.

It's hard to believe the electorate will be 84% white, although no doubt that's what Rove is shooting for. The white vote was 81% of all voters in 2000, 82% in 2002 and dropped to 77% according to the NEP in 2004. I don't know how PEW can project 84%.

PEW has 41% white wen in the sample, which is high by every recent measure. It also has 50% males, which is against the trend of majority females in the electorate, 52% in 2000 and 54% in 2004. It's closer to parity in midterms but 50/50 sounds low.

I'm swamped with sports and didn't check the crosstabs of ABC or Gallup, but after briefly looking at PEW I'm confident the generic downturn is somewhat exaggerated.

Pew's narrowing mirrors 1994 exactly,

 as Josh Marshall noted yesterday.

While there have definitely been major liberal advances since the 1930's, and there are clearly large liberal pockets in America, mainly in the larger cities, but also in some of the smaller ones (especially near major universities), by and large America is and always has been fairly conservative, socially, culturally,legally and politically. It's only in the economic and business arena that we've generally been fairly liberal--and in a classical, not modern sense.

I mean, we're still having intense debates on abortion, the death penalty, gun control, gay rights, the environment, property rights and evolution, when the rest of the western world has long since resolved these issues along liberal lines. Sounds pretty conservative to me. The New Deal and civil rights advances of the mid 50's through mid-70's are still exceptions to the rule in American history. Geez, we had to have a horrible civil war in which ovr 600,000 people died in order to end slavery.

So all this talk about whether America is a conservative country seems pretty silly to me. We are clearly a conservative country, and always have been, and we're probably decades away from being genuinely liberal in the way that most European countries now are. The real question is whether we're becoming more conservative, staying just as conservative, or becoming less conservative.

Clearly, while it's fluctuated here and there, there has been an overall trend towards becoming more conservative over the past few decades, largely I think in reaction to the trauma and perceived excesses of the last great period of liberalism (50's through 70's), but also amplified by the conservative movement that has dominated our politics since 1981. And I think that this trend reached its high water mark in 2004 or so.

However, I think that we're finally moving away from this trend, and are starting to become less conservative, driven largely by a sense of fatigue and disappointment over the right's excesses and failures. Most Americans are not necessarily becoming more liberal, but there does seem to be a trend away from Reagan-style conservatism.

Whether this turns into a liberal (or, if you wish, progressive) trend is anyone's guess. Much of this depends, I think, on how Democrats handle the mandate that they appear to be on the verge of getting. If they govern well--and are seen as governing well--and are able to fight off the inevitable rearguard attacks from the right, then this might well happen. But it's still too soon to tell.

I also think that from a bird's eye view, the country has been trending more liberal over the past 75 years or so, if not 100 years (e.g. the progressive movement of 100 years ago), while at the same time remaining prodominantly conservative. There have been conservative reactions and backlashes, but on the whole the trend has been towards the left. But I think that we've yet to pass the center point.

So, long story short, while America has always been and continues to be more conservative than liberal, it has, on the whole, been gradually moving in a liberal direction, and while we've been living through a conservative reversal over the past few decades, we appear to have reached the tail end of it, and seem to be trending in a more liberal direction once again--but are still a ways from being genuinely liberal.

And I think that this year's elections will demonstrate that.

I've been screaming about this the last several hours. The Pew Poll makes a ridiculous over-correction in conservative likely voters. My guess is the nation is as liberal/conservative as it was in 2004. With liberal anger at a fever pitch, I see no way liberal votes fall below 21%, where they were in 2004. With Nuevo Liberal's caveat in mind about more conservative crossovers than liberal crossovers, and minor movement of moderates to the GOP, the final margin is ten points in likely voters for the Pew Poll. They were dishonest to suggest it had dropped to 4.

Yes, that's likely voters. Dems up 58-38. It's crap, obviously, but it's no less crap than the Dems up 4. And it's a nice last narrative for the election. It included the Saddam sentencing, Haggard scandal, and it's after the Kerry gaffe. It's the LAST poll before the election.

What I learned from Paul Perry - and I keep going back to him because he taught me everything I know about this - is that what you should be prepared to do is to have a way of measuring all of the things that you're interested in covering and be able to look at those measurements in the current election relative to your experience in previous elections. And we try to do that. The one time I didn't do that was in 2002, because I was pre-occupied with other things. On an ad hoc basis, I kicked out one of my traditional questions out of the turn-out scale and it really hurt our projection. It made it too Democratic. I won't do that again.

We are not going to be ahead by more than Republicans were in 1994, and then fail to take control. That. Just. Isn't. Going. To. Happen. The will of the people is on our side, and it will not be thwarted. Not this time.

You know, Chris, I felt just fine about our chances before reading this post. I felt even better until I got to the end and read this. But now that you've just Guaranteed The Win, I'm freaking out. Don't you know anything about superstition!?

I'm having these awful visions now of this little gem above being reposted on Free Republic and RedState in a few days and being ridiculed after the GOP holds us off in the House. Thanks, buddy, you really made my day. =/

I have not written any concession speech for the House. It is just like the Connecticut Senate primary. I don't intend to write one. There is no moral victory here. It is all-in. We are not going to be ahead by more than Republicans were in 1994, and then fail to take control. That. Just. Isn't. Going. To. Happen. The will of the people is on our side, and it will not be thwarted. Not this time.

We are pot committed and we are going to win. Don't waste time thinking about mourning, organize for victory.