A Democratic Romp; Or a Stolen Election?

While Karl Rove expresses confidence that the GOP will maintain control of both the House and the Senate on November 7th and darkly hints about "private polls" containing "the numbers" that assure a GOP triumph, a growing number of not-so-private polls suggest that Rove has little to be cocky about.

The new AP/Ipsos poll out today is such a poll. The AP story (Poll: Middle class voters abandoning GOP) paints a rosy picture of the Democrats' chances for taking the House. Excerpts of the AP story follow:

Poll: Middle class voters abandoning GOP

The 2006 election is shaping up to be a repeat of 1994. This time, Democrats are favored to sweep Republicans from power in the House after a dozen years of GOP rule.

Less than two weeks before the Nov. 7 election, the latest Associated Press-AOL News poll found that likely voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats over Republicans. They are angry at President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress, and say Iraq and the economy are their top issues.

At the same time, fickle middle-class voters are embracing the Democratic Party and fleeing the GOP - just as they abandoned Democrats a dozen years ago and ushered in an era of Republican control...

The AP-AOL News telephone poll of 2,000 adults, 970 of whom are likely voters, was conducted by Ipsos from Oct. 20-25.

In it, 56 percent of likely voters said they would vote to send a Democrat to the House and 37 percent said they would vote Republican - a 19-point difference. Democrats had a 10-point edge in early October...

Likely voters have low opinions of both Bush's job performance and that of the GOP-controlled Congress. The president's approval rating is at a dismal 38 percent while Congress' is even lower - 23 percent. Two-thirds of adults say America is on the wrong track...

Voters have grown increasingly angry at the Bush administration and Republican leadership in Congress throughout October.

Only 12 percent of likely voters say they are enthusiastic about the administration. The percentage of those who say they are angry with it has grown to 40 percent from 32 percent in early October. As for the GOP-controlled Congress, 32 percent of likely voters call themselves angry, up from 28 percent.

Groups of voters who grew more angry throughout the month include: women, minorities, liberals, moderates, Democrats and people who voted for Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., for president in 2004...

As strong as this AP article makes the Ipsos poll appear for Democratic House candidates, I was struck by how much stronger the actual data appeared to be when I reviewed the poll for myself. I was also impressed at the lengths Ipsos appears to have gone to, and the transparency they showed in determining just who among their sample of 2,000 adults was most likely to actually vote (they came up with a sub-sample of 970 "likely voters"). Every pollster has its own formula for determining "likely voters," many of them highly suspect. Rarely do they share with the public the questions they use to determine just who is likely to vote. Ipsos does, and clearly a respondent's insistence that he or she plans to vote is not good enough for Ipsos to determine that they actually will.

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