Charlie Cook's Hurricane Warning

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One of the reasons Charlie Cook is such a successful political forecaster is that he's very good at spotting trends. The analyst sees a trend so significant in the internals of the latest poll by the team of Democrat Peter Hart and Republican Bill McInturff that Cook has designated it as "at least a Category 3 or 4 hurricane":

Among the registered voters in the survey, Republicans led by 2 points on the generic congressional ballot test, 45 percent to 43 percent. This may not sound like a lot, given that Democrats now hold 59 percent of House seats. When this same poll was taken in June 2008, however, Democrats led by 19 points, 52 percent to 33 percent.

That drop-off should be enough to sober Democrats up, but the next set of data was even more chilling. First, keep in mind that all registered voters don't vote even in presidential years, and that in midterm elections the turnout is about one-third less. In an attempt to ascertain who really is most likely to vote, pollsters asked registered voters, on a scale of 1 to 10, how interested they were in the November elections. Those who said either 9 or 10 added up to just over half of the registered voters, coming in at 51 percent.

The pollsters looked at the the most-interested voters from the same survey from 2008 and compared them with the results from this year. Although voter turnout typically falls off in midterm elections, Hart and McInturff saw that only one group of voters was more interested in the coming election than it was in 2008: those who had marked their ballots for John McCain and Sarah Palin. But the groups that registered the largest dropoff in interest were "liberals, African-Americans, self-described Democrats, moderates, those living in either the Northeast or West, and younger voters 18 to 34 years of age." These are precisely the groups that voted for the ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Better batten down the hatches, Democrats. Hurricane GOP is brewing, and it is due to hit Congress and a number of state capitols November 2.

h/t: Daniel Foster

- JP