It's Hard Out There for a Republican

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly created this graph from Research 2000 polling:

Even though the 29th is more Republican than the Northeast in general, I think this is a pretty powerful display of what I was trying to say in this post. The boilerplate rhetoric from the current Republican party only appeals to Southerners. Reed can't have a cut-and-paste campaign -- he needs to distinguish himself from the rest of the party.

Comments

Slightly different take from Politico and the PEW Research Center:

"Only 49 percent of Americans now hold a favorable view of the Democratic Party, down from 62 percent in the same poll shortly after Obama assumed office"

"Only 40 percent of those polled held a favorable view of the Republican Party, a number which Pew noted “has not changed all year.”

(Heck - maybe they only polled southerners)

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26262.html#ixzz0RsESTxOR

And the Democrat infighting continues:

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0909/Paterson_blames_weak_Obama_r...

That's interesting. The poll that's the source of the graph has the favorables for Dems at 41, and for Reps at 23. It's a Research 2000/Daily Kos poll. Kos publish all crosstabs. You can go here and see the trends:

http://www.dailykos.com/weeklytrends

I checked the Pew site, and I think this is the poll that Politico is referencing:

http://people-press.org/report/545/obama-approval-steady

They don't publish their crosstabs -- if they did, we could see where R support is strong or weak by region of the country.

Daily KOS - now there is a group with no political agenda :) - maybe you should check out Dick Cheney's polling outfit.

Kos polling is actually some of the best around. He publishes all his crosstabs and questions. It's done by Research 2000, a quality polling outfit. He makes a lot of money on his site, and to his credit he plows it back into polling.

It's similar to FoxNews commissioning a poll by Gallup or Rasmussen.

Fox or Daily Kos - it still makes one wonder - are they going to pay for results they don't like?

He does - constantly, and wants to. For example, his polling shows the VA governors' race a lot closer than Rasmussen:

http://kos.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/18/783761/-VA-Gov:-Not-much-change-(unlike-Ras)

You have to separate two things - Daily Kos the website and Markos Moulitsas ("Kos") the proprietor of the Daily Kos. The website allows anyone and their brother to have a blog there. So there's a lot of nutty stuff attributed to Daily Kos that doesn't reflect Kos' viewpoints, and folks like Bill O'Reilly delight in finding something idiotic posted there and attributing it to "The Daily Kos".

But Kos himself is a hardheaded political realist who pays for a lot of polling to understand the political climate in the US. You might disagree with his politics, but his methods are pretty darn shrewd, and he's building a media company that's rich enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on good polling every year. I real Kos' page at Kos mainly to get the results of his latest polling.