There are a million things to be said about this batch of polling data which Stan Greenberg assembled for the Campaign for America’s Future. But I need to nurse the illusion that I have something better to do on this Friday night than write about polling data. So just make a point of browsing through the charts and graphs yourself.
The one number that really caught my attention is on page five. In the November 8th poll of actual voters, on the question of 
which party was better at “keeping America strong,” Republicans beat out Democrats by an astronomical thirty-nine points — Republicans 59; Dems 19. (The specific breakdown of the responses can be found on page 18 of the questionnaire. Yes, it sounds like it should be 40, not 39, but they must be rounding off or something.)
Republicans will crow over those numbers. And it’ll be terribly annoying listen to them do so. (I overheard one of the most annoying of them crowing about it today. And, boy, did I want to slap this dude around …) But Democrats really need to think long and hard about what those numbers mean. That’s just an astonishing number.
This is both a substantive problem and a political one. In fact, the key is that it is a political problem in large measure because it is a substantive problem. This issue is starting to get more attention among professional Dems. I discussed it a month ago in The New York Post and Heather Hurlburt wrote a powerful piece on the issue in the current issue of The Washington Monthly. It’s starting to get attention. But it needs to get a lot more.
