It seems the Democrats might just have the presidency locked up for the foreseeable future, if Jamie Carville is to be believed:
A late July poll for Democracy Corps, a non-profit polling company, shows that a generic Democratic presidential candidate now wins voters under 30 years old by 32 percentage points. The Republican lead among younger white non-college-educated men, who supported President George W. Bush by a margin of 19 percentage points three years ago, has shrunk to 2 percentage points. Ideological divisions between the Republican party and young voters are growing. Young voters generally favour larger government providing more services, 68 per cent to 28 per cent. On every issue, from the budget to national security, young voters responded overwhelmingly that Democrats would do a better job in government.
It is not just Democracy Corps that has found this. A host of new polls and surveys over the course of the past few months has served as a harbinger of a rocky 2008 election for Republicans.
The March poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 50 per cent of Americans identify as Democrats while only 35 per cent say they are Republican. The June NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed 52 per cent of Americans would prefer a Democratic president while only 31 per cent would support a Republican, the largest gap in the 20-year history of the survey.
Now earlier this week I talked about what seemed to be the Democratic tactic of not doing much to oppose Bush and to let the mounting disgust of the voters for him get them elected; this may just be the vindication of this tactic.
Had the Democrats opposed Bush more effectively earlier, for example on the War on Iraq, the American voters might not have become as disgusted with Bush and the Republicans as much and the Democratic lead would therefore be much smaller. Also, as I’ve also argued before, the Democratic leadership essentially agrees with quite a few of the politics Bush has enacted over the past six-seven years, not the least being the War on Iraq.
By mounting a token opposition on these points, by playing the victim in the Republican’s demonisation strategy, the Democratic Party’s leadership has tried to have its cake and eat it too: get unpopular policies enacted without being blamed for them…