GQR/Democracy Corps poll: GOP House majority in jeopardy already

Buyer’s remorse is setting in quickly, according to Democratic pollster Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.

GQR polled 50 House districts currently held by Republicans which are expected to be major Democratic targets in 2012. The results indicate that the Republican House majority is already endangered, less than three months into Speaker John Boehner’s regime.

From GQR’s polling memo:

The Republican incumbents in these districts, 35 of them freshmen, remain largely unknown and appear very vulnerable in 2012 (depending on redistricting). In fact, these incumbents are in a weaker position than Democratic incumbents were even in late 2009, or Republican incumbents were in 2007 in comparable surveys conducted by Democracy Corps.

These incumbents, identified by name, have an average approval rating of 35 percent across the 50 districts, with 25 percent disapproving. Another 38 percent were not able to give the candidates a rating, suggesting lack of visibility. This is about 10 points lower than the approval rating Democratic incumbents held in July of 2009 (with comparable disapproval rating).

More importantly at this early point, just 40 percent of voters in these districts say that they will vote to reelect their incumbent (asked by name in each district), while 45 percent say that they “can’t vote to reelect” the incumbent.

This leads to a congressional race that is dead-even in the battleground. After winning these seats by a collective 14 points in 2010, these Republicans now lead generic Democratic challengers by just 2 points, 44 to 46 percent, and stand well below the critical 50 percent mark. The race is dead even in the top tier of the 25 most competitive seats‚ 46 percent for the Democrats versus 45 percent for the Republicans. In the next 25 seats, the Republicans have a slight 42 to 47 percent advantage.

You can find a list of the 50 districts polled here. House junkies will recognize most of the usual suspects there – IL-13 and IL-16 are probably the biggest surprises.

In the summer of 2009, the 40 vulnerable Democrats tested in this poll actually had a six-point lead; 36 of them wound up losing. And at this time in 2007, the 35 most vulnerable Republicans had the same six-point lead; 19 of them lost reelection.

Compared to that, a 2-point lead for GQR’s 50 most vulnerable Republicans doesn’t look very strong. And if even half these seats are lost, there goes the Republican majority.

Now, the Republican incumbents have a couple things on their side. One is time; a lot can happen in the next year and a half. Another is redistricting; while Republicans don’t control the redistricting process for all these incumbents, they can make some of them safer, and they can also endanger a few of the remaining Democrats to balance out losses.

Still, these are bad early indicators for the new Congress. Voters don’t know their new representatives very well, and they don’t like them especially well, and they seem quite prepared to vote Democratic in 2012.

24 thoughts on “GQR/Democracy Corps poll: GOP House majority in jeopardy already”

  1. These are the twelve Republicans on that list I found that represent districts that went for both Obama and Kerry; please add more if you find any, on the list or not.

    Allen West

    Bobby Schilling

    Chip Cracaack

    Charlie Bass

    Ann Marie Buerkle

    Jim Gerlach

    Pat Meehan

    Mike Fitzpatrick

    Lou Barletta

    Charlie Dent

    Dave Reichert

    Sean Duffy

  2. that they polled 8 (!) Illinois Republicans.  As I’ve mentioned before, I expect Illinois to be the state with the biggest number of turnovers, as their vulnerable freshmen (and even longtime incumbents) struggle in new maps with Obama at the top of the ticket.

    Having a huge sweep in Illinois would really get us closer to taking back the House…after that it gets tricky and our best hope for large gains elsewhere seems to be that midwest and northeast states swing back hard towards Democrats and even GOP gerrymandering can’t save their freshmen.

  4. Not that I expect redistricting to do us any favors.  But if Obama can bring great North Shore African-American turnout again and McMahon runs again (as most people expect he will)… could be a good race.

  5. I think I’m ready to call for a new rule, which is that if there’s a presidential campaign presence in the state, every single congressional district should be looked at–in 2012, at least. This is even more called for if there’s a competitive senate race. I get that we would need a great year to win some of these red seats, or whatever they end up as after redistricting, but if we are going to have a lot of extra money to throw around, what better way to use it? In a different thread, I wrote the following, which describes one particular long shot district. Tell me if I am off the deep end:

    Just to follow through a little with what I was saying before, the link below tells me that there were 464,904 voters in the district. Yet, only 282,142 people voted in the House race, a difference of 182,492, including those who voted for the Libertarian, for a turnout rate of 60.68 percent. Pence received 180,608 votes compared to Welsh’s 94,265 votes, a usually huge victory.

    How might have Welsh overtaken Pence? Well, let’s assume that, for whatever reason, turnout went up to 70 percent. That would bring 325,433 voters out, or 43,291 more. Let’s say that 65 percent of these additional voters went to Welsh, giving him an additional 28,139 votes for a total of 122,404. That would bring him up to 37.61 percent of the vote. So no, he’s not really close. But assume that Pence either didn’t get an additional 15,152 votes, or rather did but lost that many votes from previous voters. Let’s say that, instead of getting an additional 15,152 voters, he wouldn’t get those, and would in fact lose 10,000 more. Welsh would then be up to 137,556 votes, or 42.29 percent.

    That’s a huge jump, yes, but if Pence went down 10,000 votes, that’s about a six or seven percent drop–not exactly huge. If Pence saw a full ten percent drop, he’d have been down about 18,249 votes, to 164,243 total. We already gave Welsh all of the 43,291 additional votes from increased turnout, but let’s give him ten percent of Pence’s voters, the full 18,249. That would bring him up to 155,805 votes, or 47.87 percent. The difference separating the two would then be 8,348. An additional 10,000 voters, just to give Welsh a buffer, would bring him up to 50.94 percent.

    So, in this scenario, Welsh would have gone from 94,265 votes to 165,805, or 71,540 more votes. That’s almost an 80 percent increase. Sounds incredible, right? No, impossible? Absolutely, positively, out of the question? Well, maybe not. For starters, out of that 71,540 votes, 18,249 of them, about 26 percent of that came from Pence’s total. Maybe some will claim that’s an unrealistic total, but again, that’s only shaving ten percent from what Pence would otherwise have had, so I don’t think so. That leaves the other 53,291 votes. Out of that number, 43,291 would come from increased turnout from that already existing voter pool. Maybe that sounds like a lot, but it represents going from 60.68 to 70 percent. That would a pretty big increase, but entirely doable. Now, what about those extra 10,000 votes? Well, we could always find new voters and register them. If we found 20,000 new voters and registered them, we’d increase the voting pool by about four percent. That sounds doable. And if we could have a mediocre success rate of just 50 percent, we’d have our additional 10,000 voters.

    Perhaps this just won’t work, because there aren’t enough voters, registered or unregistered, that would really consider voting for a Democrat. But I think Obama’s percentage completely undermined that claim. Maybe it’s different for legislative races in this district, but at the very least, they aren’t so reflexively Republican that they won’t ever vote for a Democrat. That, at least, gives us a chance. We’d need a good candidate and the right resources to get over the hump, but the template is there.

    http://www.in.gov/sos/election…

  6. I would love for GQR’s spin to be right, but they have the GOP up 46-44 in the generic ballot, and what people here are missing is that that number is in the ballpark of polling last year.  Yes it’s a little tighter than the pre-midterm average, but there were in fact plenty of generic ballot polls last summer and fall that showed this kind of small GOP lead, and once in awhile a superficially credible-looking poll that even gave Dems a lead!

    The commenter above who noted this is bunk pre-redistricting is echoing Gonzalez.  And my first paragraph above also echoes Gonzalez.

    I’ll be excited if-and-when the worm really turns in our favor.  But GQR’s spin and the swallowing of it here is so much irrational exuberance.

    I do think we have some genuinely good polling so far this year that can read as positive tea leaves for 2012 House races.  The big one is that my reading of the Congressional approval polling trend is that the new GOP House, after inching up in approval post-midterms to almost reach a break-even point in some polling, is tanking back to unpopular Dem 2009-10 levels.  So Boehner and his crew’s honeymoon is already over.  Second, the state-level fights over labor rights is helping us and has potential to trickle up in voting behavior if this becomes a lasting influence for voters for this cycle, as I believe is likely (although not yet certain) to be the case.

    So there are some real good signs for us there.

    But they don’t translate to a genuinely tightening generic House ballot.  There’s not that much buyer’s remorse yet, most voters are very much still giving Boehner et al. the benefit of doubt and a chance to debunk the voters’ skepticism.

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