NBC Poll Also Had Results That Bust Media’s Pro-GOP Election Narrative, Including 43% Split on Who Should Run Congress

If you listen to cable news and read corporate-media political sites, it’s all over for the Democrats. Why bother waiting for the vote on Nov. 2? Dems should just quietly step aside and let Speaker John Boehner and the Republicans move in, drapes and all, to their new digs at the Capitol.

Case in point was, as we noted yesterday, the five days that the media flogged away at a Gallup generic congressional poll that gave the GOP a 10 point advantage — a first for either party in the history of the poll. Today, in the wake of a new edition yesterday of the same poll showing that the GOP’s 10 point lead has vanished — the parties are tied at 46 percent — discussion of the Gallup generic poll has also disappeared. Funny how that works.

At TPMDC, Evan McMorris-Santoro has a piece up on yesterday’s sudden turnaround in the Gallup generic under the headline, “Narrative-Busting New Gallup Poll Excites Dems Briefly”:

Tonight, it’s the Democrats’ turn to hit the “fwd” button, blanketing the fourth estate with links to the Gallup poll ostensibly bursting the “Democratic strategy = rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” narrative.

How long will the euphoria last for Democrats?

Guess it depends on what the next poll says. The TPM Poll Average shows Republicans leading the generic ballot question 49.1-41.7, meaning that in aggregate the signs are still very bad for Democrats.

MSNBC, the supposedly liberal analog to GOP-Fox TV, focused all day yesterday on dire results of the NBC/Wall St. Journal poll, naturally. Chris Matthews, the host of “Hardball,” was particularly exercised about the Democrats’ looming losses. (His prescription: Obama should replace his top advisors right now, starting with Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, who is leaving anyway to run for mayor of Chicago, or so it appears.)

But later, on “Countdown,” Keith Olbermann spotlighted numbers in the NBC poll [PDF] that show that there is wiggle room for the Dems.

Among registered voters, the poll also found an even 43-percent split on which party is favored to control Congress, with 14 percent undecided.

On the question, “If the choice in your district had the following, would you be more likely to vote for a — (ROTATE:) Republican candidate for Congress, a Democratic candidate for Congress — or an independent or third party candidate for Congress?” 34 percent said they would vote for a generic Democrat, 32 percent would vote for a Republican, 25 percent would prefer an independent and 9 percent weren’t sure.

Since only Democratic and Republican candidates will appear on most House race ballots, arguably the 25 percent who would prefer an independent could be combined with the 9 percent who weren’t sure to produce about 34 percent who are undecided or at least potentially persuadable.

While this ain’t terrific news for Dems, it shows that there are still voters out there who have not yet committed to putting Republicans back behind the wheel of the car they totaled just two years ago, to use Pres. Obama’s analogy.

If there’s anything all pundits agree on it’s that the only way the Democrats can preserve their majority is to make the election a choice between the slow but steady progress the Dems are making and a return to radical Republican policies of the very recent past.

Framing the choice will vary from district to district and race to race, but the broad contours of the argument against choosing Republicans can also be found in the NBC poll:

[Sixty-eight] percent of respondents say they’re uncomfortable or have reservations about candidates who support phasing out Social Security and would allow workers to invest their Social Security contributions in the stock market.

That position — shared by Republicans like Senate nominees Sharron Angle in Nevada and Joe Miller in Alaska — ranks worst on the poll’s list of nine candidate attributes.

The second worst: support of George W. Bush’s economic policies. Sixty-two percent of survey takers had problems with that political trait.

Democrats have had a lot of success in the past running on saving Social Security from Republicans’ fantastical idea that the private sector would do a better job of providing pensions for every American who retires.

But the fact that 62 percent of voters in the poll opposed returning to Bush’s failed economic policies also offers Democrats an opportunity to recover some lost ground. Elsewhere in the poll, 58 percent of voters said they believed Republicans have new ideas for fixing the economy that differed from the Bush approach of tax cuts for the wealthy and (purportedly) reducing the size of government. And 35 percent believe the GOP is just offering the same-old same old.

The fact is, Republicans have offered nothing new. They are demanding more tax cuts for the rich, and they refuse to be specific about government departments, agencies or benefits they would cut.

In short, what Democrats need to convey to independent voters is simple: Not only is what Boehner and his party offering not new, it’s not even different. Put simply, Boehnernomics is just warmed-over Bushonomics on steroids.

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