One of the absolute must-haves if you’re a political junkie is the Morning Jolt, an e-mail newsletter cranked out by National Review’s Jim Geraghty five days a week. Geraghty usually covers the conservative blogosphere’s reaction to four or five issues cropping up the previous day, and it’s always entertaining stuff.
Today, he might have set the bar at a new height, though, in going through the results of a new Gallup poll which says that the Democrats’ approval rating as a party is a mere 41 percent among all adults surveyed, the worst number since Gallup started measuring party approval ratings 18 years ago.
We’ll give you the visual (from a YouTube we find even more fitting than the original), then the prose:
Gallup informs us: “Americans’ favorable rating of the Democratic Party dropped to 41% in a late March USA Today/Gallup poll, the lowest point in the 18-year history of this measure. Favorable impressions of the Republican Party are now at 42%, thus closing the gap between the two parties’ images that has prevailed for the past four years.”
But Obama and Pelosi said the public would love Democrats once the health-care bill passed! They promised! (Expiration date achieved.)
At Powerline, Paul chuckles, “As Bill Otis says, ‘it has taken Obama less than 15 months to do for the Democrats what it took Bush eight years to do for the Republicans.’
Clifton B., writing at Another Black Conservative, notes, “Democrats should take note of these numbers. Unlike Rasmussen, which only polls registered voters, Gallup polls all adults. The all adults method is always more favorable to Democrats. For Gallup to find such a significant drop in favorability for Democrats should set off all sorts of alarms for the left. I don’t think that the current Democratic leadership will be concerned with these findings. That is because they long ago agreed to trade the party’s viability for lasting progressive change. For hardcore ideologues like Obama and Pelosi the Democrat Party is expendable if America is permanently stuck with the European socialist model.”
Hugh S., writing at Wizbang: “Yeah, I know a polling firm can design and conduct a poll to fish practically any opinion they desire from the gullible, illiterate masses they routinely cull to produce their preferred result. That’s why reading the crosstabs (thanks, Allah) in these polls is important. It’s also why the polls sponsored by the old media during election cycles were so suspect. . . . However, Gallup and Rasmussen have been reporting some polling lately that should scare the hell out of Democrats in the business of getting elected. . . . There is no mystery in these reports. Last week’s jobs numbers were Potemkin metrics as evidenced by today’s report that jobless claims rose ‘unexpectedly” last week. How many times have BLS jobs reports been described as ‘unexpected’ in the past year? I’ve lost count. Most of the problems afflicting Democratic incumbents in 2010 and the President seem to revolve around unemployment and the failure of Congress and the President to adopt policies that promote private sector job growth. Fly over country voters understand this; the inside the beltway political class does not. Democrats ignore it because they have forgotten the results of 1994.”
Interesting the 1994 comparisons, because America has periodically tried governments run entirely by Democrats, and they keep recoiling in horror. In each case, the party sells itself as moderate; what follows is governance at least one giant step to the left of public opinion: the Carter administration, Bill Clinton’s first two years, and now the start of the Obama era. The good news for us is that based on past history, American electorate will scream “Get it off, get it off” at this governing crew like it’s one of those face-hugger critters from the Alien movies. The bad news is twofold: Within twelve years or so, the electorate will forget and start believing that this new group of Democrats really is moderate. And like those face-hugger critters, these guys can quickly implant something dangerous within the body politic.
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