A must read essay at TIME by Mark Halperin.
Teaser:
Under pressure, the Democrats are cracking. On both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, there is a realization that Nancy Pelosi's hold on the speakership is in true jeopardy; that losing control of the Senate is not out of the question; and that time, once the Democrats' best friend, is now their mortal enemy. Since January, when Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat, the President's party has tried to downplay in public what its pollsters have been saying in private: that Obama's alienation of independents and white voters, along with the enthusiasm gap between the right and the left, means that Republicans are on a trajectory to pick up massive numbers of House and Senate seats, perhaps even to regain control of Congress.
Evidence of the pervasiveness of this view: Sunday's New York Times op-ed page, which featured a series of short essays from leading Democratic and Republican strategists about how Obama could go about staging a political comeback, focused not on November's midterms but on 2012 — an indication that Washington conventional wisdom has already written off prospects of Democrats sustaining a majority in the legislature.
Read the entire thing.
Much is being made on the left by a poll, an outlier, from Gallup showing Democrats jumping into the lead on the Generic Congressional polling, yet polling from multiple other organizations show a significant steady lead by Republicans.
Bloomberg poll- Republicans up by eight points.
Rasmussen- Republicans up by 9 points.
ABC News/Wash Post- Republicans up by 4 points.
Fox News- Republicans up by 4 points.
Gallup- Democrats up by 6 points.
All polls conducted in July and show why Democratic politicians and liberal bloggers are starting to panic, evidenced by their rush to hold the only outlier poll close to heart.
I have often said polls are simply a glimpse into the mindset of respondents at that particular moment and what should be looked at is patterns, steady, sustainable patterns that show the trend over a period of time.
The trend since January looks very bad for Democratic politicians and the strain and stress is starting to show and without a major event to alter the present trajectory, the potential losses for House Dems come November must feel like a train bearing down on them with no way to apply the brakes.
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