Wet Blanket? Obama leading in Wisconsin, Virginia.

Basking in the glow of a Scott Walker Republican win in the Wisconsin special recall election, it's hard to imagine that Wisconsin wouldn't be in play come the November presidential election.  Michael Barone did an excellent job of dissecting the exit polling there that said voters still preferred Obama to Romney .  The lesson - exit polling is still a flawed tool.  But today there is a new poll out by We Ask America that shows Obama is still leading in the state according to The Hill..

President Obama has a 5-point lead over Mitt Romney in Wisconsin, according to a We Ask America poll released Thursday.

Obama leads Romney 48 percent to 43 in the first survey to be conducted in Wisconsin since Gov. Scott Walker (R) won his recall election on Tuesday.

That margin is unchanged from the Real Clear Politics average of polls from before the election, when Obama held a 49 percent to 44 lead over Romney. However, some recent polls showed

Obama with a considerably larger lead. The president led by 12 in a Marquette University poll released last week, and by 10 in a Reason-Rupe survey...

Is that a wet blanket for the GOP?  It might be.  We Ask America used likely voters, not registered voters.  Likely voter models like Rasmussen typically skew more towards Republicans than Democrats which means that bit of inherent Democratic advantage seen in many polls is already discounted.  The good news for Romney is that he leads among independents in Wisconsin in this poll.  Barely, but he leads.  The other good news is that 9% of voters and 18% o0f independents remain undecided.

The raw numbers don't seem to be available, but the Republican/Democrat/Independent split may have an unreasonable skew towards Democrats as polls quite often do.  So it might be a wet blanket but not necessarily.  Time will tell as more post-Walker win polling gets done.  And the Wisconsin poll did not happen in isolation today.

According to the fairly reliable Quinnipiac polling, there's also an Obama 5 point lead in the state of Virginia:

President Obama has a 5-point lead over Mitt Romney in the critical battleground state of Virginia, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday.

Obama leads 47-42, down from 50-42 in the same poll from March.

Not comforting, but the caveats do bode better for Romney than the headline in this case.  The poll is among registered voters, not likely voters - that should indicate the race in Virginia will be tighter than Quinnipiac is reporting. I was unable to see the partisan split between Republicans, Democrats and Independents but curiously, independents were breaking in the state for Obama 45% to 37% with only 7% responding they were undecided (Don't Know).  The other noticeable skew was women breaking heavily for Obama.  The poll is more of a wet blanket for me than the We Ask America poll, or the good news coming out of Michigan today.

Overall, polling or no, I'd rather be in Mitt Romney's shoes today than president Obama's.  The tailwinds right now are very clearly heading in one direction.

What to make of Jersey?

In a Quinnipiac poll released last week that headlined how voters felt about the TV show Jersey Shore, President Obama's approval numbers, underwater, went from bad to worse, but he'll probably still win the state if the deeper dive in the data holds true.

Health Care Numbers - The Polls

That the health care bills keep inching closer to fiscal nightmare reality is very telling when you look at what the polls say about the public's disdain for the reform.

Rasmussen on Saturday had the Oppose camp at 51% and the Favor camp at 41% for the latest health care reform bill. But we all know they are conservative hacks right (by that, meaning their polling numbers always come closest to reality on election day). So what did other pollsters find?

Quinnipiac University can't be so partisan can they? They reported yesterday that voters oppose it by 52% and favor it by only 38%. There's a little bit of congruence for you. Still not convinced? Public Policy Polling (A Democratic pollster)has it as of yesterday 52% opposed and 39% in favor. Seemingly, there is a common finding, no?

So why are the Democrats forging ahead? Because they either (a) don't care, they want this done (b)they don't read the polls (HA!) or (c) they do care but think that passing the legislation will magically save their electoral chances in 2010 and beyond. The answer is clearly not option B. But whether it is A or C, it doesn't matter. The fact is the numbers don't scare the Democrats, or the right Democrats (Pelosi, Reid, Obama) enough to stop this trainwreck from happening. And that's the scary part. If the numbers were 80% opposed 15% in favor, I think the result would still be the same.

The Democrats are going to trick, twist, spin, and ram their way through this, leaving carnage for the Democrats in Congress, carnage for the anti-abortion crowd whom they used without remorse, carnage for the health and health insurance industries and carnage for the American economy. Outcome be damned - they will get this done. $300 million here, false conscience votes there, whatever it takes - it will get done. Which in the end I suppose is a good thing because this whole fiasco is going to make a lot of people sick.

What's with Gallup?

Gallup has consistently show an Job Approval rating for President Obama between 68% and 62%. True, it's trended downward since his inauguration, but at infinitesimal amounts. A 6% drop over 4.5 months?

And it has shown his disapproval numbers increase from an astoundingly (and possibly unreasonably) low of 12% up to 32%. A high by Gallup's calculations. Even so, the trend has been up from only a 26% disapproval as of early March. In other words an increase of disapproval of 6% over 3 months.

That's probably not unreasonable under normal circumstances. After all Gallup showed George W. Bush sinking from 35% to 33.1% between 2007 and 2008. Trends take time to unfold.

But these are not normal circumstances. There are two wars, an economic meltdown and conservative discontent over the socialization of America along with the requisite tax increases, national debt balloon and indebtedness to China. These are quite far from normal times.

But when you take other polls into consideration, Rasmussen, which has Obama at 53, appears to be the outlier, not Gallup.

AP has Obama at 64% approval. Quinnipiac has him at 59%, the Democratic pollster Democracy Corps has him at 58% and USA Today/Gallup has him at 61%.

Glass Half Empty

Every time Obama's numbers start to dip, he gets on TV with a speech or an international trip, and buys himself a short term bump in popularity. The harsh reality for conservatives, is that Gallup is still not wrong. There are a number of reasons for that, including the fact that the unified voice coming from conservatives, isn't unified.
There's no way to argue against a fleet of similar polls.

What's a conservative to do? Stop focusing on each other, and start focusing on the real problem - liberal democratic socialism.

Glass Half Full

To end on a happy note - the speeches can't last forever. Not if the wheels come off his recovery plan. Not exactly a glass half full situation, but at least his big government policies might be doomed by it.

The bigger plus for the GOP, is that Obama's approvals are slipping. 6% over 5 months is not so good. At that rate by November 2012 his approval rating wold be at 9% to 10%. Of course they won't get that low; his hardcore liberal base is bigger than 10%. But conservatives don't need his numbers to get that low. If they get below 46%, which is entirely feasible, the GOP will be in good shape by 2012. And getting to 46% approval would require a drop of 16% or a drop of 4.5% per year. According to Gallup, he's proven he can do that in less than 5 months.