2008: The Making of A Landslide -- A Progress Report

Reprinted from Open Left:

I just want to do a brief review here of some of the recent signs pointing to an ever-more-likely landslide victory scenario this November, with special emphasis on the House.

I'm combining information from three sources: Rasmussen, Democracy Corps and Cook Political Report.

First, there's the latest information on Partisan ID from Rasmussen, based on their daily tracking polls.  Here's the chart I generated from their data. It shows how Democratic Party identification jumped sharply from the beginning of the primary season, after falling into the doldrums during 2007, when the Democratic Congress basically failed to deliver much of anything. It's remained fairly steady the last few months, but at record high levels:

A bit explanation and the table the chart is based on can be found on the flip, along the goods from Democracy Corps and Cook Political Report.

Democracy Corps:  Battleground Disticts Extremely Promising

First, Democracy Corps makes it clear that their battleground polling is increasingly focused deep into Repubican territory:

Even as we modified our sample design to include more hard-to-reach Republican-held districts, Democrats have significantly expanded their lead in this totally Republican battleground that Bush won by 12 points in 2004 and Republican members won by the same margin in 2006. You have to remind yourself that this is not a national poll but a poll in Republican-held seats where Democrats have moved to a 7-point lead (50 to 43 percent). Further, Republican incumbents have a very weak standing to be reelected while Democratic challengers enjoy a larger pool of winnable voters to approach in this election, win the issue debates and prove to be resilient to the most vicious Republican attacks. The underlying dynamics of the race show that the battleground could expand even further into Republican territory as more voters are open to vote Democratic in November.1

Will there be a second wave election in a row? Obviously, Democrats will not win all of

these competitive seats but there is no reason to think they cannot win a majority of these seats in an environment that is increasingly Democratic.

[T]he structure of the race as well as Democrats' advantage across the board show that 2008 can be another wave election for Democrats. To take advantage of this opportunity Democrats will have to expand the playing field further into Republican territory.

 Releasing its latest numbers, this is what Rasmussen had to say, in part:

The Democratic Party maintained its huge edge in party identification during the month of May. Barack Obama's Party now has the largest partisan advantage over the Republicans since Rasmussen Reports began tracking this data on a monthly basis nearly six years ago (see history from January 2004 to present).