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Karl Rove’s Nightmare

The accuracy of the findings are based on interviews with 30,655 adults in 2006, an 0.57-point margin of error — “about as close as you can get to perfection in the world of polling.” From 2001 through 2005, “party identification balance” in the Gallup polling, before independents are queried, stayed within 2 points of each […]

The accuracy of the findings are based on interviews with 30,655 adults in 2006, an 0.57-point margin of error — “about as close as you can get to perfection in the world of polling.”

From 2001 through 2005, “party identification balance” in the Gallup polling, before independents are queried, stayed within 2 points of each other. But for 2006, Democrats pulled away, leading Republicans by 3.9 points, with 34.3 percent identifying themselves as Democrats, 30.4 percent as Republicans and 33.9 percent as independents.

“This represents a swing of 5.8 points in just three years, from a GOP lead of 1.9 points to a deficit of 3.9 points. It’s not that Democrats grew that much; it’s that Republicans dropped, with the independent column picking up much of the slack,” argues Cook.

But for Cook, “the real jaw dropper” is the responses of independents when asked which party they lean toward. Here, Democrats jumped from a 1.3 point advantage in 2001 to a 10.2 advantage in 2006: 50.4 percent for Democrats, 40.2 percent for Republicans.

According to Cook, “This 10.2-point advantage is the biggest lead either party has held since Gallup began tracking the leaners in 1991.” For the last quarter of 2006 the Democratic advantage actually rose to 14.2 points.

Cook admits that these figures measure the attitudes of adults, not voters. However, he doubts that there is a differential of more than 10 points between adults and voters. He limits his interpretation of this data to the view “that whatever inherent advantages the GOP had in Electoral College math might be gone.” ~G. Tracy Meehan III

Karl Rove used to dream of the permanent Republican majority and he liked to draw comparisons between our own time and the era of Republican presidential dominance for the first third of the twentieth century.  Mark Hanna was his god.  Karl Rove seemed very clever, as we all still (sort of) remember, for discovering that independents weren’t really as independent as they claimed they were, which made pandering to the center less important than mobilising “the base.”  We all know this.  Well, those days of the non-independent independents are apparently truly and completely gone.  The prospects of the GOP holding the White House for 16 of the next 24 years after 2008 are not at all good.  The chances of recovering the House given the current GOP bunker mentality are remote.

As I was thinking about this, I realised that the fate of the GOP here reminds me a great deal of the state of the Conservative-Liberal Unionist Party in the early twentieth century.  Unlike the progressive Republican Party over here at the same time, the Conservative-Liberal Unionists did not enjoy dominance for most of the early twentieth century.  They had presided over the Boer War and won the famous Khaki Election of 1900, capitalising on popular enthusiasm for the successful conclusion of the first, formal stage of the war (two years of insurgency in the veld followed the surrender of the Afrikaner republics).  However, soon thereafter, in 1906, they experienced an electoral drubbing the likes of which no man today living (except perhaps for those who would still admit to having been a Progressive Conservative in Canada in the ’90s) has ever seen.  (They lost 246 of 402 seats.)  2006 may be quite analogous to the 1906 Conservative defeat.  2006 was the chance for the GOP to learn where they had gone off track.  Everything they have done since November suggests they have no idea that they even went off track.  They seem constitutionally incapable of acknowledging Iraq as the source of the party’s deserved woes.  As long as Iraq continues to drag down the GOP, it may not matter which candidate they nominate next year, because any one of them is going to get blown out of the water if these numbers hold up among likely voters.

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