Morning Jay: Obama's Dime Store Sociology, Grijalva In Trouble, and New Polling Data!

And yet the DCCC has dropped a negative ad in the district.  That’s the kind of year this is.

3. NPR Poll.  This poll has grabbed plenty of attention:

GOP candidates have a four-point edge among likely voters in the 53 most competitive congressional districts held by Democrats, and they're tied with Democrats in an additional 33 seats that make up a group of the next-most-competitive Democratic-held seats, the new NPR Battleground Survey found. Forty-eight percent of voters on the first "tier" said they planned on voting Republican on Nov. 2, while 44 percent said they planned to back a Democrat. The voters in this tier reside in 53 currently Democratic seats rated as "likely Republican," "lean Republican" or "toss-up" by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Five percent were undecided.

It squares pretty well with the generic ballot numbers we have been seeing.  It’s important, however, not to take these numbers at face value.  After all, we can’t know what this means for any particular district based on aggregate results.  Personally, I think the generic ballot is a much more informative metric.  It can't tell us about specific districts, either, but we can compare it to history and get a sense of what it means for seat switches this year.

4. Obama Voters Bailing?  Another poll that has been making waves:

Nearly two years after putting Obama in the White House, one-quarter of those who voted for the Democrat are defecting to the GOP or considering voting against the party in power this fall. Just half of them say they definitely will show up Nov. 2, according to an Associated Press-Knowledge Networks poll released two weeks before Obama's first midterm elections.

Yet in a reflection of broad dissatisfaction with politics, just as many people who backed Republican presidential nominee John McCain are either supporting Democrats now or still considering how to vote.

I’m not sure why this is such big news.  These kinds of numbers are pretty typical when the macro forces are against an incumbent party as much as they are lined up against the Democrats this cycle. 

Consider, for instance, this bit of data from the 2008 national exit polls:

Notice the percentage of people who claimed to back Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008.  It’s 17%, just about where the Obama defection rate is right now, according to the AP.  Similarly, in 2000 George W. Bush stole about 15% of the Clinton ’96 vote (while Gore stole just 7% of the Dole vote).  Bill Clinton took 21% of the 1988 George H.W. Bush electorate in 1992, and Ronald Reagan took 29% of Carter’s 1976 vote in 1980.

There is no doubt that the Obama campaign drew new voters to the polls, but ultimately the election hinged largely on the swing vote.  If McCain had kept that 17% of the old Bush vote in his coalition, he would have been elected president.  Independents and soft-partisans put Obama into office in 2008, and they are gearing up to vote Republican here in 2010.  That's why we call them swing voters!

5. Quotes for the Day.

"I want to warn you about something...Right now the same special interests who would profit from the other side's agenda - they're fighting back. The empire is striking back. To win this election, they are plowing ten's of millions of dollars into front groups. They are running misleading negative ads all across the country...This isn't just a threat to Democrats, this is a threat to our democracy!"

-Barack Obama, October 17, 2010