Heading into the home stretch

ANALYSIS

By Charlie Cook

updated 10:05 a.m. ET Nov. 2, 2006

Charlie Cook • E-mail

WASHINGTON - As Election Day nears, the fundamental dynamics of this cycle have not changed on either the national "macro" level or the "micro" level. Looking at the individual 435 House, 33 Senate and 36 gubernatorial races, this still looks to be a very ugly midterm election for the GOP.

Although this election is now down to the individual race level, it's still useful to look at the national poll data to make sure that the fundamental dynamics haven't changed. In the latest Cook Political Report/RT Strategies poll [PDF], taken Oct. 26 to 29 among 1,764 registered voters (MoE +/-2.3%), Democrats led Republicans in a generic ballot test by 13 points, 52 percent to 39 percent. This is not fundamentally different from the three weeks of combined polling since Oct. 5 to 8 among 4,291 registered voters (MoE +/- 1.5%) that shows the Democratic margin at 12 points, 50 percent to 38 percent.

When you narrow it down to the most likely voters -- based on who said they voted in 2004 and their interest in this election -- the Democratic margin balloons to 26 points, 61 percent to 35 percent. That's even wider than the 21-point margin, 57 percent to 36 percent, in the three combined weeks of polling. While no one expects Democrats to win the popular vote for the House by 21 or 26 percent, and even after knocking five points off of the Democratic percentage for their natural skew on these numbers, this still shows a very strong Democratic wave.

The fascinating thing in this newest poll, though, is only 32 percent of registered voters called themselves Democratic and 30 percent called themselves Republican. When respondents are pushed to say which party they lean to, the Democratic lead moves to 43 percent to 37 percent. But when you factored in who voted in 2004 and those who said they were most interested in this election, 51 percent said they were Democrats, or at least lean Democratic, and only 34 percent said they were lean Republicans, or leaned that way. This is a sign that Republicans are being interviewed in the polls but are falling out of the screens for likely voters.

The fortunes of individual Republican and Democratic nominees tick up and down a few points from day to day, but overall it seems more of a "one step forward-one step backward" process for the GOP. For the last week, while the Republican environment has not gotten appreciably worse, it remains very poor. As one GOP consultant put it recently, "there isn't a lot of good news out there, but the bad news is coming at a slower velocity." The only thing getting worse is the situation in Iraq, the source of perhaps 70 percent of President Bush's -- and his party's -- problems.

Complicating matters more is that in many Senate and some gubernatorial races, there are as many as three or four sets of tracking polls. For example, each of the two campaigns have a poll, and there's one for their national party committee or the independent expenditure effort for the party, meaning that there is a constant swirl of often conflicting numbers. It is not at all unusual to hear of two brand new polls, both by competent pollsters, sometimes of the same party, with one showing a lead of a point or two or three, the other showing a comparable deficit. Some are released publicly (if they say what the candidate or party wants people to hear), but most are not. It often is contradictory data and shows no clear direction as to which direction a race is going other than likely to be very close. In the Senate, this is particularly true. Go figure.

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