A few days ago I suggested that while it’s far too soon to point to any real trends, there are some signs in the poll data that things may be looking up a bit for the Democrats. Not that it’s not going to be a rough November for the Dems. But maybe not quite as bad as some think. To that end, here are a few more data points and possible trends I’ve been watching.
First is a key polling question that doesn’t look at any particular race but is a good barometer of partisan trends going into a congressional election — the congressional generic ballot.
(ed.note: To zoom in on a particular date range, either click the “view” button hold your cursor just under the x-axis, hold the mouse button down and then drag over the date range you want to see. To see what the trend looks like with different pollsters removed, click the “filter” button and then click “pollsters” and click or unclick the pollsters whose data you do or don’t want included.)
As you can see there’s been a slight move in the Dems direction, since around the time of the Massachusetts special election.
Next there’s opinions on health care reform. Usually, when you create a dataset it’s very important to make sure you’re comparing apples and apples, not apples and oranges. And in this case, that’s very difficult to do since pollsters talk about ‘the Health Care Reform bill’, ‘Obama’s Health Care Reform bill’, and so forth. And that creates some fuzziness to the numbers. But as you can see, the trend has been moving in Health Care Reform’s direction over about the last six weeks.
Definitely note that these movements are only a few points in either direction. And they’ve wiggled around before. But these are two trend lines I’ll be watching closely.
