Not lighting it up. (Jim Young/Reuters)

Not lighting it up. (Jim Young/Reuters)

The numbers don't lie—Republican voters are increasingly disenchanted with their presidential field, and are having a hard time motivating to vote in their caucuses and primaries.

Over at CPAC this week, their super-activists aren't feeling much happier.



It’s as if the depressed Republican turnout and muted enthusiasm for the front-running Mitt Romney, apparent in Tuesday’s contests in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado, picked up and moved east. “I’m just so disappointed," Glen Bonderenko, a 59-year-old direct-mail fundraiser from Colorado Springs, Colo., said on Thursday. “Our own candidates are beating each other up, and it’s not good for the party.’’ William Burton, 22, a Republican Party activist from Roanoke, Va., was equally wistful. “I don’t feel like we have real strong candidates. Those in the race are just acting like conservatives to get elected,’’ he said. “I know it’s a long shot, but I wish someone like Daniels or Christie would come along and win the nomination at a brokered convention.’’

We have been tracking voter intensity every other week with the Daily Kos/SEIU State of the Nation poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, and the trends are unmistakable:You can certainly see the trends. The Dec. 1 poll was an inflection point. Democrats were at their one-year nadir, with just 43 percent of them very excited, while Republicans were near the top, with 57 percent excited.

But then the GOP presidential contest happened, and both parties are headed in opposite direction. When we last asked this question a week ago, 54 percent of Democrats were very excited, while just 51 percent of Republicans were.

That, my friends, is an intensity gap. And we're seeing what happens in the GOP primary when such a gap turns up—people don't turn out to vote.

So I realized I forgot to include a key for the graphs.

The dark, top line is "very excited", the middle line is "somewhat excited", and the bottom one is "not at all excited". You can click on the graph to go to the poll results page and make it all interactive.