If 2012 is going to be a wave election (either way) we will begin to get some signs of it before too much longer. Both sides still have very large arrows in their respective quivers, so we can’t assume that small signs today won’t be reversed or overwhelmed by future events. Still, we are reaching the point where data is meaningful and there are two things I saw today that seemed like they might be the first omens of a blowout.
The first came in an interesting article by Steve Singiser of Daily Kos Elections. Mr. Singiser explained what we can learn from partisan (or internal) polling. We know these polls are unreliable, but we also know that politicians don’t release polls that show them doing badly. If one party’s politicians are releasing lots of internal polls, and the other party’s politicians are not responding, that’s a sign of a coming wave.
In 2010, sixty-one percent of released internal polls were issued by Republicans. So far, this year, fifty-eight percent of released internal polls have been issued by Democrats.
The second sign of a wave election I saw today came from the extensive polling of Democracy Corps. Their introductory note tells the story:
Less than 100 days until the election, the latest battleground survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps shows Democrats with an advantage in the most vulnerable tier of Republican districts. The first Democracy Corps survey of the reapportioned battleground shows Republican incumbents in serious and worsening trouble. The 2012 campaign has just turned the corner on 100 days and the message of this survey could not be clearer: these 54 battleground Republicans are very vulnerable and many will lose their seats.
These members, on average, are barely ahead of their challengers and are as vulnerable as the incumbents in 2006, 2008 and 2010. Those elections we now know crystallized earlier—in 2010, incumbent vulnerability translated into anti-Democratic voting by March as health care came to a close in 2010. These incumbents are equally vulnerable but have not yet paid the price for the Ryan budget and their priorities, but it is clear that their support is now falling.
They break the candidates into two tiers of twenty-seven. The first tier is looking quite bleak for Republicans, and the second tier is looking wobbly.
For more than a year now I have been predicting that this election would tilt one way or the other, and not ultimately resemble the closely contested races we saw in 2000 and 2004. Will it be a repeat of the mild drubbings we saw in 1996 and 2008, or will it be more like 1984 and 1988?
For starters, no matter how badly Romney does, unless he is engulfed in scandal, he has more upside than Mondale or Dukakis. But he’s not as solid as a Bob Dole or John McCain, either. His weakness is starting to show up in the polls. His job is to turn it around with the selection of his running mate and a strong convention. Because, we are already seeing the first indications that the congressional Republicans are taking on water.
