http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/09/if_the_election_were_held_toda.html"If the election were held today," says House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), "we would have the majority of the House back." I'm not enough of an election wonk to say whether that's true. But it's hard to square with this graph that Steve Benen pulled from the results in the latest Daily Kos/Research 2000* poll:
(see link)
"The Congressional Republican name is mud everywhere outside the South. And even inside the South, they're only viewed favorably by 34 percent of voters. That's relatively better than the seven percent in the Northeast, or the 13 percent in both the West and Midwest, but it's not good.
"Quite seriously," writes political scientist Joshua Tucker, "if I saw this type of regional distribution of support for a political party in a country like Slovakia, I would assume the party represented an ethnic minority."Politics is like the old joke about being chased by the bear: You don't have to outrun the bear. You only have to outrun the other guy. In the South, the Congressional Republicans are outrunning the other guy: Democrats get a 21 percent favorable rating. But in every other region, they're winning the race: Congressional Democrats have a 53 percent favorable rating in the Northeast, a 45 percent favorable rating in the Midwest, and a 43 percent favorable rating in the West. It's not impossible that individual elections diverge so sharply from national trends that Democrats could lose Congress despite being preferred by the voters. But it seems unlikely."
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