Public Policy Polling has some new data out that confirms or is at least related to the point I made a few days ago about terrible trends for the Democrats which Republicans, nevertheless, seem to be doing their level best to overcome.
As PPP’s Tom Jensen notes, not only are the broad numbers bad for Democrats, but the trends are going in the wrong direction. I noticed a few days ago that, I think for the first time on our Obama approval dataset, the last dozen or so numbers were all in negative territory.
(A potential contrary note: Charlie Cook points out that Gallup’s last two congressional generic numbers show a turnaround for Dems — something that other pollsters’ number have yet to show. It’s not clear whether it’s a blip or a trend; but their latest poll will be released later today.)
At the same time though, at least in PPP’s numbers, in individual senate races the trend is in the Dems direction. In eight recent polls (OH, CA, PA, IL, NH, LA, NC and KY), the Democratic senate candidates actually improved their position. And in probably half of those cases, the prime driver was some sort of stumble or implosion by the Republican candidate — especially in Nevada and Illinois and arguably in Ohio, Kentucky and California too.
These are only PPP’s numbers. But from watching polls pretty closely across the board my sense is that the results of other pollsters at least track with this trend, even if the numbers are not quite so clear cut.
To be clear, it’s not that I’d recommend the Democrats put a lot of stock in these numbers. But it does suggest an odd trend and a strong element of unpredictability.
