If this turns out to be true, it’s good news for the Democrats.
If I had to name the two biggest factors that cost Democrats the 2010 election cycle it would be 2 e’s- economy and enthusiasm. A huge part of the party’s problem was the bad economy, which drove independent voters strongly toward GOP candidates. But just as important was the enthusiasm gap and the fact that Republicans turned out at a much higher rate than Democrats in almost every state in the country.
I don’t know where the economy’s going to be 22 months from now but our newest weekly national survey for Daily Kos finds that the enthusiasm problem for Democrats is likely to be quickly a thing of the past.
85% of Democrats in the country are either ‘very excited’ or ‘somewhat excited’ about voting in the Presidential election next year, actually slightly higher than the 82% of Republicans. There are more Republicans who are ‘very excited’- 62% to the Democrats’ 57%, but ‘somewhat excited’ voters are going to come out the vast majority of the time. The ones you need to worry about are the ‘not excited’ voters- and 18% of Republicans and 16% of Democrats fall into that category, virtually indistinguishable.
I hope this is true, though it would prove me wrong, as I’ve been predicting the opposite, or at least predicting that Obama would be unable to generate the level of enthusiasm he did in 2008. One thing I think is true is that Republicans have nowhere to go from here but down. If they want to keep the base enthused, they will have to drive away the Independents, which I think is what they’ll do.
Still, it would be great if the Democrats actually did, or at least advocated doing, something we could actually get enthusiastic about, other than Joe Lieberman’s retirement, which, truth to tell, actually makes me unhappy. He only did it to increase the chances of a Republican win here in 2012.
Credit where credit is due: I despair of figuring out how to link to a tweet, so I’ll just state that I got to this article via an email from my wife who emailed a tweet from ctblogger who was himself retweeting a tweet from ppppolls, which runs the website that ran the article.
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