Democrats are now ahead by a “statistically insignificant” amount in the all important Gallup generic preference poll!
This means that until next week, Obama is only Clintonian and not Carteresque, that this is 1982 not 1994, that even though this is still a right-center nation, Obama may have succeeded in “putting his thumb on the scale” and moving the country left.
Remember, though that this is only for registered voters, not likely voters, so when the intensity gap kicks in, Democrats could be way behind in this poll.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Fucking NPR’s meme this afternoon during their profile of a so-called endangered Dem in OH was that if such a candidate in a deliberately gerrymandered Dem district was in danger, WATCH OUT FOR THE LANDSLIDE.
Of course the “everyday small bidnessman” they interviewed, old enough to have voted for JFK and Ronald Fucking Reagan, claimed that he wouldn’t vote for Obama in Nov. When asked if he’d vote for his incumbent Dem Congresswoman, he said “of course I will”.
There will be more movement in the Senate races than there will be in the House despite what the corporate media ho’s will have us believe.
Mark S.
What happens if Warren Beatty throws his hat in the ring?
(Seriously, I don’t remember that at all. Did Halperin think Bulworth was a documentary?)
BGinCHI
The American electorate is like a 16-year-old girl: the nice guy who always tries to be her friend getting constantly fucked over by the rude rich asshole who doesn’t deserve her.
The nice guy is the Dems.
I hope this turns out like Valley Girl.
Please feel free to flip the genders. It’s an open analogy.
Odie Hugh Manatee
The title should be: We’re saved! Maybe.
Ok, at least until it’s time to change to: We’re Doomed! Probably.
WereBear
Pat Paulsen would have been better than W.
Mark S.
And furthermore, I don’t care if Donald Trump ever thought of running for president. I refuse to read anything about that douchebag.
El Cid
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: I don’t often hear of your average small business owner voting Democratic or being liberal. Most that I have known and worked for see themselves as the vanguard capitalist class exploited both by the government and their own workers.
sven
Now that Dancing with the Stars is back, oldsters can’t be bothered to answer telephone polls…
Expect a sudden hot streak for Democrats in October when The Hallmark Network rolls out their Murder She Wrote/Matlock primetime lineup!
4tehlulz
Your headline is not all caps and 24 pt bold font.
You fail at blogging.
El Cid
I saw a discussion in DKos a few days ago pointing out that registered voter polls have been overall better predictors of actual race outcomes than likely voter polls. Don’t know. But it seemed like a reasonable argument based on evidence.
gbear
I’ll take this good news without bitching about it, thank you.
cat48
@DougJ I want you to know you make my day w/that title. It just makes me smile. I do regret you couldn’t fit all your accomplishments in though. Would have been rolling laughter here.
I’m voting for the creepy Dems here in SC with reluctance. I don’t understand the theory that Obama & some Dems must be punished by not showing up and unfortunately that is a strong theory swirling around out there.
Cat Lady
There is no such thing as generic Republican. There is only whackadoodle Republican. If there were generic Republicans I would be worried, but I’ll take a pass on the panic until election day.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Mark S.:
Two words: game changer.
sven
@gbear: You’re not really a progressive are you?
Omnes Omnibus
This is obviously a statistical outlier. No attention need, or will, be paid to it by the national media.
Joe Beese
Are you referring to that 16.7% unemployment intensity gap?
Yeah, that might factor in.
trollhattan
Who are these people that “sit out” elections? I always vote, even in the boring special elections for dog catcher and whatever California propositions are being flung our way that month. A November ballot? Never missed one in my life.
Especially since California started doing automatic absentee ballots at the voter’s option, it’s so simple. I just assumed everyone else thought so.
El Cid
@Cat Lady: Generic Republicans are available at WalMart for a dollar a dozen. Much cheaper than name brand Republicans at your more posh stores.
wmd
Saved? Really?
We’ll just get more of the same democrats selling us out if they keep control of the house. /snark
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@El Cid:
I’m only parroting what NPR wanted me to hear. I live in the second reddest county in Misery. What small bidness owners we have here don’t employ anybody (they all mow grass, ie. they call themselves ‘landscapers’) but voted 3/4s for McCain in 08 and that’ll never change.
The guy they profiled in OH probably met their preconcieved criteria of not being a doctrinaire Dem. They’re supposed to do some Rethug profiling tomorrow. I can guarandamntee you they’ll talk to nothing but doctrinaire Repups.
WereBear
@El Cid: And yet once you get the wrappers off, you can’t tell the difference.
Mark S.
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
That made me spit out my drink!
mr. whipple
It’s not too late for Obama to nationalize the banks, give us all single payer and cramdown, which will finally energize the base. But he must do this within 24 hours.
gbear
@sven:
I’m a Walter Mondale democrat.
When one of your senators is Al Franken, you don’t have to be bitter to be progressive.
sven
@WereBear: How do you get the wrapper off a Republican?
I’m sure there’s a punchline here somewhere!
El Cid
This is utterly awesomely delicious.
Via Wonkette, Republican candidate for Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker released with much fanfare his “68 PAGE JOBS PLAN!”
It’s not blank, surprisingly — but it’s the next best thing.
Each page is filled up with giganto-font print so there’s like 20 or so words on each page.
It’s like some middle school kid who was supposed to do a 10 page essay and having never tried this or heard of it on the way to school he writes like 5 words a page in giant letters and thinks he’ll get away with it.
Or it’s entirely meant for people with really terrible visual difficulties who need to read the page from 10 feet away. And also who read slowly and have a hard time understanding sentences.
PDF here. Warning — It’s 68 Pages!
asiangrrlMN
@gbear: True that. I am so extremely satisfied with Senator Franken, I cannot begin to snark about it.
@El Cid: I desperately needed a laugh. Thank you so much for this! 68 pages. Snort.
sven
@gbear: I campaigned for Walt Minnick last time…
I’ll be spending a very long time in the booth this year.
El Cid
@asiangrrlMN: John could make filling up the blog a lot easier if each letter he used was like 3 inches tall.
gbear
@El Cid:
I saw that a few minutes ago. I thought it was a joke. I can feel the ripples here in St. Paul from Wisconsinites rolling their eyes.
kormgar
Yaaay!
We’re gonna win!
Or something.
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: I refused to download that weeks ago, and I am not getting out of the boat now.
sven
@El Cid:
There are sentences which span 3 pages!
Mark S.
@El Cid:
tl,dr
Oh wait, it’s actually only two pages.
J.W. Hamner
A historic come back! I bet it was because Obama was so full of leadership this week.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Mark S.:
The best part is that DougJ has his own version of the McEstimate.
The Jestimate.
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: Yes. I mean, threads could be epic with only four replies in them. I actually downloaded it, and it had problems reading the text. Snort. When it finally downloaded, I giggled over how stupid it was.
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Oh, nice. We have to work that into the Lexicon. “I jestimated that an eleven-billionty fee-fees were hurt in the penning of this blog post!” Or, better yet, DougJestimate!
J sub D
The GOP will take the House, the Dems will retain a majority in the Senate, my guess is 53-47 (counting the “independents” as Dems).
There’s about a month and a half to go and I don’t see anything on the horizon that’s going to change the enthusiasm (or lack thereof) of the party bases.
I consider this a good thing. The divided government of the last 6 years of Clinton’s administration worked out pretty darned well.
machine
I get the image of Gandalf cresting the marina near Anacostia Park, followed by Eomer and the Rohirrim. As they charge the House, sunlight blinds the teatards below.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@J.W. Hamner:
He put away the telemprompter and told the American people that he was hurting too.
gbear
@J sub D:
Yea, that impeachment thingy was just dandy government. Things worked out so well for the house speaker, too.
And that was before the republican party went totally nuts.
Edit: The Clinton years was when the republican party went off it’s meds. It’s now been living on the street for two years.
bobbo
I was in line for the bank teller (getting a cashier’s check, ok? Jeez. I use my ATM card all the time, I swear), and on CNN Wolf Blitzer was talking about how Dems risk losing the rich people vote. Fox News with uglier anchors.
Roger Moore
@sven:
You tell him that contraception is going against God’s plan.
sven
@gbear: Did we ever learn who actually killed Vince Foster? Someone needs to get on that!
steviez314
Among voters likely to be foaming at the mouth on election day, Democrats are down 34 points.
MikeJ
@Omnes Omnibus: I like the fact that wonkette sent several thousand people go go download his 3mb fail. 1000 downloads is 3gb of traffic he’ll have to pay for.
Linda Featheringill
@J sub D:
I beg to differ.
The GOP will not take the House, but the margins will be smaller and Nancy might have to do more negotiating to get stuff through.
And the Senate will probably have to do things on a bipartisan level or not get anything done at all.
lacp
@sven: Well, that depends. Are we talking two wetsuits here?
Roger Moore
@El Cid:
Hilarious. I especially like that he can’t even fit “telecommunications” on one line; at that size it’s too big to fit the page width.
Mark S.
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
And a tear ran down his eye. It was like when Spock cried in that Star Trek movie (I honestly don’t remember which one).
gbear
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
You know it’s true. Mondale is a visionary.
J sub D
@gbear:
I find myself thinking that the GOP has not spent enough time in the wilderness to learn anything. Partly because the Dems spent 12 years in the wilderness (’94-’06) and didn’t learn a whole heck of a lot.
El Cid
For your edification, the entire text of the 68 PAGE JOBS PLAN! by Scott Walker, with paragraphing removed.
Tax cuts! Cut regulations! Tort reform!
There are a few normal things, but mostly it’s standard GOP boilerplate. I’m sure it’s much more sophisticated in the 68 page format.
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid:
Yeah, the weather has nothing at all to do with it.
MikeJ
@El Cid: 1014 words.
DonkeyKong
I picked the wrong election cycle to stop sniffing glue.
FlipYrWhig
@MikeJ: 1000 words = 68 pages? The rule I give students is that ONE double-spaced, 12-point-font page is 250-300 words. I hope none of them this semester is from Wisconsin.
Linda Featheringill
@El Cid:
Bless your heart for doing the work involved in distilling that monster!
3 pages, Times New Roman 14 pt [nice and big and easy to read].
El Cid
@MikeJ:
“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Walker,
I would like to schedule a meeting with you to discuss Scott’s troubles in following instructions on assignment.
Recently the students were asked to do a report on Wisconsin’s economy, and they were required to write one of 10 pages in length, and to list the books and magazines and newspapers and websites they used.
Scott wrote 9 words which stretched across all 10 pages.
As you know, this is unacceptable, and if such performance continues, Scott will be in great trouble academically at this school.
Signed,
Scott’s Teacher”
—
“Dear Scott’s Teacher,
You stay out of our son’s damn business and you liberal teachers need to stop keeping God out of the classrooms because if Jesus was there with Scott he would know what to write and it wouldn’t have anything to do with you trying to mind control our children in your Marxist Satanic ‘economics’.
Sincerely,
Scott’s Folks”
El Cid
@Linda Featheringill: Just used MS Word’s “Replace” function to remove most paragraphing and then bolded. I’m sure it took me less time than to figure out how to promote this thing without being hideously ashamed, though admittedly this would not be a characteristic of personality that Republicans would worry about.
jwb
@J sub D: Since we’re throwing out gut-feel figures here rather than anything based on polls, I think the goopers will be lucky to take 25 seats in the House. Your Senate numbers seem about right, though I think the fact that the GOP has nominated a couple of whackadoodles makes it plausible that the Dems could do considerably better. I don’t yet put much stake in the Dem GOTV this cycle, but if OfA can actually show that they can turn the numbers out, the Dems are actually in position to have minimal losses despite everything. Now, I don’t think that’s a likely scenario, but it’s conceivable.
On your other point about divided government, you clearly don’t remember how godawful bad 1995 was. You also have no idea how much crazier the current batch of Republicans is.
FlipYrWhig
By fitting 1000 words on 68 pages, Scott Walker’s jobs plan is nothing less than a bailout for one important Wisconsin corporation: Wausau Paper.
Huggy Bear is the business and economics editor of this comment
Paid for by Friends of Scott Walker, John Hiller, Treasurer
With friends who produce fantastical stuff like:
Any
succe
ssful
econ
omic…
it makes one wonder “Is our friends learning?”
I bet each piece of legislation will be 500,000 pages long after his administration enforces the 69pt font law. Maybe he was trying to appeal to the investment capital that doesn’t move to Florida and Arizona for the weather.
Blotto von Bismarck
@El Cid:
No, I like it far better in its original format. Read it as though it is poetry, and imagine the speaker pausing at every line break. In accordance with standard word processors/browsers/etc., I can’t imagine a Rich Lowry feeling the starbursts, but as poetry, it is almost on the level of Sarah Palin. Almost.
Blotto von Bismarck
If George W. Bush views polls as frivolous pastimes, then that’s good enough for me. Truth is determined on how well you can stand your ground against inevitable treefrog backlash, not on how quickly you capitulate to the will of the American people.
MikeJ
Grade level scoring:
Readability Formula Grade
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 14.00
Gunning-Fog Score 16.20
Coleman-Liau Index 14.80
SMOG Index 12.30
Automated Readability Index 15.10
Average Grade Level 14.48
Other Statistics
The tool reported that this text contained 42 sentences, with 1019 words (24.26 per sentence) made up of 1735 syllables (1.70 per word).
http://www.addedbytes.com/code/readability-score/
Peter
Does anyone outside of Our Media Echo Chamber actually think that that poll means a goddamn thing?
jibeaux
@Cat Lady:
Ha! This was my hubby’s point: “their problem is, what we have as Republicans are about as far away from generic as you can get.”
RAGGEDT
@J sub D: Except for that impeachment thing…
Mike in NC
Can this be spun as anything but good news for John McCain?
El Cid
@Blotto von Bismarck: If you paused at each line break you’d never get through reading it.
TooManyJens
Um, Mr. Walker? We have the Internet now. You don’t need to print your documents in type big enough to be read from the other end of the state.
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig: Lumberjacks rule! It’s a Wausau thing.
daryljfontaine
@El Cid: My personal favorite part of that whole thing is the EXCLAMATION POINT! in the PDF URL.
Because it couldn’t just be ScottWalkerJobPlan.PDF, it had to be 68%20PAGE%20JOB%20PLAN!.PDF … but even longer than that.
D
El Cid
@daryljfontaine: When you combine the exclamation point and the capital letters, it makes it extra powerful.
SiubhanDuinne
@El Cid #54:
Or, to summarize:
1. Whatyousaid [snipped]
2. ???
3. PROFIT / VICTORY!!
Kristine
@Omnes Omnibus: I learned at a retirement seminar the other day that Wisconsin taxes retirement income at 6%. I do know folks who would have liked to retire there who won’t for that reason.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Show us where the pollster touched you, Doug.
morzer
@Linda Featheringill:
I suspect the Dems keep a token majority of around 10 seats in the House, with the Senate at 54-46.
trollhattan
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
Dude…you SO owe me a keyboard.
Mnemosyne
@Kristine:
I lived in the Midwest during the winter of 1985. People in Wisconsin don’t retire to Florida or Arizona because of a 6% tax (though they may well retire to Illinois or Ohio instead, neither of which tax retirement income). They retire to Florida or Arizona because they’re tired of the goddamn arctic cold. Which is why I have lived in California for the past 20 years.
chaseyourtail
I’m almost as tired of hearing about the “intensity gap” as I was of hearing about the “rural white voters” in ’08 who were supposedly going to crash the whole damn system…
November 2nd can’t come soon enough.
Triassic Sands
Actually, things had already changed before you’d even finished writing the first sentence. Volatile year.
asiangrrlMN
@MikeJ: Seriously? I write over twice that amount in one blog entry. If I used the same size font Scotty did, I would have a 136 page PDF file per entry! Holy shit.
ETA: It really does show that with the Republicans, the end (having that number of pages to one up the Democrats) justifies the means.
John Bird
Things are (arguably) looking up for the Democrats on Earth-83, world of global proportional representation and a kindly Marty Peretz who donates to the Red Crescent.
Robert Waldmann
It isn’t just Gallup. You see the same thing in the pollster.com average if you toss out Rasmussen. 6 of 11 non-Rasmussen pollster.com aggregated polls in September are likely voter polls.