NY-20 And Obama’s “Unpopularity”

The rest of the column is a recap of Rasmussen’s other polls, which show the president’s agenda strikingly unpopular. Let’s assume that’s true, and all other polls about Obama are wrong. Why, then, are Republicans faltering in the first competitive race of 2009 — the open House seat in New York’s 20th Congressional District? Why does the Siena poll just released in that race record a 65 percent approval rating for Obama in a district where he only won 51 percent of the vote over John McCain’s 48 percent? ~Dave Weigel

These are good questions. New York’s 20th District should not be this much of a challenge. Gillibrand only won the seat in ’06, and before that it was in Republican control. Republicans actually outnumber registered Democrats there by large margins, and still the GOP seems to be having a hard time securing Gillibrand’s former seat. Significantly, the Republican candidate, Jim Tedisco, has booted the NRCC from its role in providing advertising content for his race, as he has apparently come to realize that the ad campaign is tone-deaf. The same Siena poll Weigel mentions has the NY-20 race in a statistical dead heat. A once-formidable Republican lead has disappeared almost completely. This has occasioned a lot of carping about the bad job Michael Steele is doing at the RNC, but this is bigger than Steele’s poor leadership. If the GOP fails to pick up this seat, failure will have been a team effort and I think it will owe more than a little to the Republicans in Congress.