Far too soon for DOOMWATCH, but one year in you don’t want to see this kind of reaction if you’re a Democrat:

Short version: both Democratic and Republican voters are happier with Congress these days, and Independents are not. The uptick for the first two is easy enough to explain: both side’s partisans are happy that their respective sides are slugging it out. The question is, which side are the folks in the middle supporting?

Well…

The new 2009 low in approval from independents comes at a time when a majority of registered independents say they would likely vote Republican rather than Democratic, 52% to 30%, if elections for Congress were held today. With Republicans and Democrats exhibiting the same degree of loyalty to their parties’ candidates, independents’ preference for Republicans gives that party a 48% to 44% edge over Democrats among registered voters overall.

…it’s not really a question, is it? Although I imagine that a lot of people are going to be doing their best to suggest that it is.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Dem Senators are peeling off of President Obama’s government takeover of health care and its liberal fantasy land that spends more than a trillion and contains hundreds of billions in new taxes.

As James Carville told CNN, President Obama only has 57 votes.

Reuters James Pethokoukis is reporting that Senators Liberman, Landrieu and Nelson are at NO, and Bayh maybe too. Pethokoukis is reporting the same thing Hammond said in his memo, that reconciliation is a no-go. (Politico is reporting, correctly, that reconciliation rules would strip the Stupak amendment.)

As we all know, no 60 votes, no laundry. (Senator Reid needs 60 votes to break the filibuster on the motion to proceed to consider the bill. If he does not get 60 votes, ObamaCare never comes up on the Senate floor.)

There are whispers in Washington watering holes that some Dem Senators are quietly hoping Senator Nelson will vote against cloture on the motion to proceed. This will let the Senators who are up in 2010 off the hook from the nightmare of proceeding to this politically toxic bill.

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(Via AoSHQ) Shift of eight points since July, which for Gallup represents the GOP ‘edging ahead.’ The current numbers are GOP/Democrats 48/44.  And 52/30 among independents.  And this represents registered voters, not likely ones.  Gallup tried to caveat this one every way that it could, but has to conclude:

Since Gallup regularly began using the generic ballot to measure registered voters’ preferences for the House of Representatives in 1950, it has been rare for Republicans to have an advantage over Democrats. This is likely because more Americans usually identify as Democrats than as Republicans, but Republicans can offset this typical Democratic advantage in preferences with greater turnout on Election Day. Most of the prior Republican registered-voter leads on the generic ballot in Gallup polling occurred in 1994 and 2002, two strong years for the GOP.

Particularly interesting is this amusing graph:

…and yes: the Democratic line does look uncannily like the trajectory of an airplane just after it has lost all power to the engines, mid-flight.  A real shame that this didn’t come out last Friday, huh?  There’s a bunch of Blue Dogs who probably would have appreciated the opportunity to factor this information into their long-term voting strategies.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Apparently the secret to passing ObamaCare is for the President to acknowledge that all Members of Congress have something they don’t like about the bill, but to vote for it regardless:

AP reports the President said in New York yesterday:

“The bill you least like” improves coverage for millions, he said in New York. “Let’s make sure that we keep our eye on the prize.”

Seems a little strange to announce this in New York, a blue state, that members need to hold their nose and vote for health care reform. Is this the winning formula? Is holding New York members of Congress becoming tough? And if the President needed to say this in New York, what does this mean for the rest of the country?

The roll call vote on the motion to proceed to S. 1776 is instructive of what happens to a bill that cannot stop the filibuster on the motion to proceed. President Obama and the White House asked Senator Reid to put $247 billion in new spending off budget to buy off the American Medical Association. Majority Leader Reid was embarrassed. The White House, Senator Reid said, wanted him to bring the bill up. He needed 60 votes to stop the filibuster. He got 47 votes. Missed the mark by 13 votes. Here is the simple filibuster math (60 minus 13 = 47.)

Perhaps this is why President Obama did not go public on the vote, he did not want to risk a Chicago is knocked out in the first round of voting despite his personal lobbying for the Olympics type experience.

This is a lesson for everyone: no cloture, no laundry. And 60 votes in the Senate is a tough number to hit, even with 60 Democratic voting Senators (58 Dems and two independents). S. 1776 is dead. The bill did not even make it past the motion to proceed.

Today, AP ran a story questioning whether President Obama has the 60 votes to overcome a filibuster on ObamaCare. Really? Really, really. Here is some of Charles Babington’s piece:

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Given in a polite, understated, terribly-sorry-to-bother-you sort of way:

Parties Nearly Tied for Congress in 2010

PRINCETON, NJ — Roughly a year before the 2010 midterm elections, Gallup finds the Republican and Democratic Parties nearly tied in the congressional ballot preferences of registered voters. Forty-six percent of registered voters say they would vote for the Democrat and 44% say the Republican when asked which party’s candidate they would support for Congress, if the election were held today.

The interesting part of this article is in what it lacks: to wit, any good news for Democrats. Gallup pointed out the registered/likely voter differential, the fact that historical trends are arguing for serious Republican gains next year if this keeps up, and even that the public despises the job that Congress is doing (which also is notably lacking in good news for Democrats, although it tries to give a little).  No doubt there will be people out there that will try to explain why all of this shows how horrible things are for the GOP right now; which is fine.  We all need more comedy in our lives.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The U.S. Department of Labor web site acknowledges that Labor Day originated as

a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

Now there’s no harm in honoring those who labor - hard-working Americans are the backbone of the greatest free-market economy in the world…and we hope it stays that way, Obama’s socialism fetish notwithstanding.

But on this Labor Day weekend, isn’t it interesting that Gallup has just published the results of a poll showing that for the first time since the mid-1930s, less than 50% of Americans approve of labor unions?

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30 years ago in Macomb County, Michigan, white blue collar workers voted en masse for Ronald Reagan. Pollster Stan Greenberg termed these people “Reagan Democrats.” While I am loathed to cite Wikipedia on matters political, the entry factually notes that “Researchers have not tracked what political path these voters took after the end of the Reagan and the elder Bush administrations.”

Nonetheless, 30 years after Reagan’s victory, 4 Presidents later, and a sea change of employment and demographic shifts across America, David Frum is sad to see them leave. Never mind that (A) they haven’t really existed in a while and (B) they are generally to the right of Frum on the ground he wants to cede to attract voters to the GOP.

Frum mourns the loss of the Jackalope of modern American politics based on this Gallup poll.

The poll shows that among white voters, more identify themselves as Republican than Democrat and more identify themselves as moderate/liberal than conservative. Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters are not broken down. Frum writes

If it’s right that white conservative Republicans make up 23% of the population and that white conservative Democrats make up another 6%, things do not look promising for advocates of an all-conservative electoral strategy.

He goes on to tilt his windmill into the picture:

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Clearly in reference to Jim Cramer’s I’ve-been-saving-this-for-months revenge clip* of a few days ago, the Gallup organization would like you to know that there’s no historical relationship between a President’s approval rating and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

None at all.

Absolutely zero.

Mind you, that wasn’t the argument that got made - Cramer was arguing that this specific President’s disapproval ratings (via Gallup!) were being reflected in the S&P 500 going up - but nonetheless, Gallup felt the need to do that analysis.

Well. Thanks for letting us know.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, I see the large holes in Cramer’s theory. So does Cramer, probably. It’s still funny that Gallup felt the need to do some repair work here. Clumsily.

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Well, that may be unfair: as Andrew Malcolm notes, if Obama hadn’t spent the last month trying to convince people that his 3.6 trillion dollar budget was a good idea it might have slipped even further than the recent Gallup poll shows that it has. Which means that he’s saved or created - what? Five, six points on the polls?

Looking at the poll itself, it’s interesting to see how an outside-the-margin of error result can be framed as ‘holding steady.’ 46/26/30 for/against/don’t know enough last month versus 39/27/33 this month, and support for it has slipped down the Republican/Democratic/Independent line. Although possibly the most embarrassing part of this whole thing for the administration is that the aforementioned media blitz - personal, online, televised, radioed, phone called, and for all I know, messenger pigeoned - didn’t have a better than a margin-of-error effect on the American public’s awareness of the issue. Admittedly, they were already pretty aware, but the Obama administration was looking for a win here, not a no-decision.

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…for the first time since Gallup started asking the question.

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