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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (306256)	10/13/2006 11:46:26 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576619

"a huge Democratic storm surge is heading toward a high Republican levee." A recent Gallup poll indicates that it is more of a tsunami than a storm surge. Here is TPM's take on it. This analysis of the internal numbers out of the latest Gallup poll provides a very clear sense of why so many Republicans are shaking in their boots waiting the results of the November election. Gallup divided respondents into "white frequent churchgoers", "white infrequent churchgoers" and "all others." Here we what are perhaps the two major cleavages in contemporary American politics -- religion and race. And we're looking at them through a rightward prism. Whites tend to vote Republican as a group, if by not that great a margin. And strong religious identification/church attendance is a very strong indicator of Republican party affiliation. So "white frequent churchgoers" should be -- and through most of my adult life -- have been the sweet spot of the electorate for the Republican party. Yet, according to this latest Gallup survey, Republicans are only coming in even with this group. If that number is even close to on the mark and remains so for the next four weeks you can be next to certain that the Democrats will blow the Republicans out in the House and very likely win back control of the senate too. You see this in this graph. Anything above the dotted line is the margin of Democratic advantage. So in August infrequent churchgoing whites were favoring the Democrats by 12 points. Now they do so by 26 points. As I think I've made clear a number of times in recent weeks I am very much in the 'believe it when I see it' campaign when it comes to November. But this is the core of the modern Republican party. And they can only split the votes evenly with Democrats in this core group, election day will really be a disaster. The only thing this break down leaves me wanting to know more of is a denominational breakdown. I'd be particularly curious to see the breakdown between churchgoing Catholics and evangelicals. Here's another look at the same process. Over at TPM Election Central, Matt Corley looked at two of the most watch election rating sites, CQ Politics and the Cook Political Report. He found that over the two week period since Foleygate blew up on September 29th, no few than 30 House races had their ratings changed. And 29 of those were moves favoring the Democrats. That is a sign both of tremendous flux and a decisive movement in one direction. Next up, is it really all Foley?

To: Road Walker who wrote (306256)	10/13/2006 5:15:31 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1576619

Bush's Approval Ratings Slip THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE October 13, 2006 President Bush's job-approval rating fell, with 34% of Americans voting him "excellent" or "good," down from 38% in September, according to a new Harris Interactive poll. • Bush's approval rating peaked shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. It has posted gains off and on since then, but it has never regained that high ground. Sixty-four percent of U.S. adults now have a negative view of Mr. Bush's job performance, compared with 61% who ranked him "only fair" or "poor" in a similar poll last month. The drop follows a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that showed the president's job approval rating fell to 39% from 42% earlier in October. With less than a month to go before the midterm congressional elections, 47% of registered voters said they would vote for a Democratic candidate, compared with 35% who said they would pick a Republican candidate. When asked about recent Capitol Hill scandals involving charges of corruption and sexual improprieties, 64% said they believed those activities were the just the "tip of the iceberg," compared with 25% who believed they were "isolated incidents." The Harris telephone poll of 1,001 U.S. adults showed a larger majority believe things in the country "have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track," at 62% compared with 59% last month. In terms of the most important issues that the U.S. government should address: 29% said the war was most important, while 15% said the economy, 13% said health care and 12% said immigration. Here are full results of the poll: Read more.............. online.wsj.com