2012 Looking Worse For Democrats Than Was 2010

Democrats are pinning their hopes on making a comeback after their disastrous 2010 election results, and they have selected 60 Republican-held “battleground” districts to try to make that change. Well, they can HOPE for CHANGE in the results all they want. According to a Democrat pollster, things look even worse now than they did in 2010. From National Journal comes the news.

One of the Democratic party’s leading pollsters released a survey of 60 Republican-held battleground districts today painting an ominous picture for Congressional Democrats in 2012. The poll shows Democratic House candidates faring worse than they did in the 2010 midterms, being dragged down by an unpopular president who would lose to both Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

Pollster Stan Greenberg released the poll with some sugary spin for Democrats, downplaying the results by arguing that the president’s jobs plan will improve the party’s fortunes.

How’s that working out for you? Yeah, that “jobs” plan is going over like a lead balloon as Senate Democrats are loudly declaring “No, you don’t”. And those lead balloons tend not to bounce all that well.

But the numbers – at least right now — are troubling for Democrats, and echoed some of the takeaways from the GOP special election upset in New York City last week. Instead of an overall anti-incumbent sentiment impacting members of both parties, voters are taking more of their anger out on Democrats. When voters were asked whether they’re supporting the Republican incumbent or a Democratic candidate, 50 percent preferred the Republican and just 41 percent backed the Democrat.

Voters in these districts said they were more supportive of Republicans than they were during the 2010 midterms, when 48 percent said they backed the Republican candidate and 42 percent said they backed the Democrat. (Republicans won 55 percent of the overall vote in these 60 battleground districts, while Democrats took 43 percent.) In 2010, Republicans netted 63 House seats – their best showing since 1948.

So, according to a Democrat pollster, the voters are two percent more likely to vote for a Republican and one percent less likely to vote for a Democrat now than in 2010, the year of the TEA Party-lead Republican tsunami. No, the Democrats will have to forget about trying to win back seats and start to figure out how to save what Democrat seats they have, because 2012 is lining up to be another year of across-the-board Republican gains, led by the TEA Party/Conservative grass-roots wave.

Here’s a blast from the past. January 25, 2010, ABC News.

Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., fears that these midterm elections are going to go the way of the 1994 midterms, when Democrats lost control of the House after a failed health care reform effort.

But, Berry told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the White House does not share his concerns.

“They just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”

(What’s with the pink highlighting, ABC?) Yes, that was the difference, alright. The 2010 elections were an even greater landslide than the 1994 elections. And it continues to be the difference. After the 1994 elections, President Clinton commandeered multiple Republican agenda items as his own. After the 2010 elections, President Obama threw a hissy fit and doubled down on his ad hominem and straw-man attacks while maintaining the Leftist agenda. So, the difference between 1996 and 2012 is you Democrats have Obama.

The news coming out of Virginia is definitely bad for Democrats, as Ed Morrissey points out.

In 2008, Barack Obama sailed to victory over John McCain in Virginia by six points in the normally Republican state, promising “hope and change.” According to a new poll from Roanoke College in Virginia, Obama certainly brought change. The incumbent President trails both Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, and can only muster 33% support against a generic Republican — twenty points below his popular-vote percentage in 2008[.] …
The really bad news? Roanoke polled adults, not registered or likely voters. Democrats tend to do much better in polls that don’t screen for registration, which means that a more predictive sample would undoubtedly have produced even less pleasant results for Obama.

Chances are very strong that Virginia is lost to Obama, as Virginians will vote the ABO (anyone but Obama) line in 2012. As Ed Morrissey said, expect Democrats to only put in enough money in Virginia to attempt to protect down-ticket incumbent Democrats.

New York City this year put a Republican in a seat held by Democrats since the 1920s as the Republican candidate tied the Democrat candidate directly to Obama. Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District, a “battleground” district Democrats hoped to capture, saw the Republican demolish the Democrat by 20 points as, once again, the Republican tied the Democrat directly to Obama.

Smitty notes that The New Republic’s William Galston is upset that Democrats are losing the independent vote.

As Democrats are looking at 2012 being a much worse outcome than 1996, there is another correlation, and that is between 2012 and 1980. There are many similarities: a bad economy that is not improving, a lot of ugliness going on in the Middle East that the President isn’t fit to handle, a very unpopular President, a Conservative grass-roots distaste for the Establishment Republicans, the Establishment Republicans fighting hard against a Conservative Republican candidate. But there are differences as well. In 1980, Republicans still had the shadow of Watergate hanging over them. In 2012, Democrats have more than just a shadow of Fast and Furious, Solyndra, LightSquared. It has even gotten to the point that many incumbent Democrats do not want to be photographed with Obama, because they cannot afford to be tied to Obama if they want to win reelection.

No, Democrats, the difference between Clinton and Obama is Obama never learned and is still rhetorically mauling the public. And the public doesn’t like being mauled.
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Cross-Post