After poll after poll saying that Democrats are going to take it in the shorts this November, here’s one that gives us an even shot. However, one thing I learned from years in the opinion research business is that, this early, generic ballot polls are not really predictive.

Nervous Democratic incumbents in Congress received a sliver of good news Thursday from a new poll that found them tied with Republicans when people were asked which party they’d vote for in November. However, the bipartisan Politico/George Washington University Battleground Poll found that, by a 9-point margin, most voters still think that the GOP will reclaim control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Still, when they were asked which party they’d vote for if they had to do it today, both Democrats and Republicans registered 43 percent. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who helped conduct the survey with GOP pollster Ed Goeas, said the results proved that Democratic incumbents weren’t as dead in the water as pundits thought. Recent polls have projected a Republican tidal wave that could give the GOP more than the 39 House seats it needs to add to wrest the speaker’s gavel from Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Republicans need to gain 10 seats to take control of the Senate. "It’s a tough battleground, but it is a battleground, still," Lake said. "It’s a tough, tough environment for both parties, and both parties are going to find some surprises in November. This electorate is relishing upsetting the status quo." Goeas said that Republicans retained a formidable advantage because their base and angry independents appeared more motivated to vote than Democrats did… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <McClatchy DC>

The reason it doesn’t matter very much is that, especially in midterm elections, the likely voters demographic grows. Sad as it is, most voter’s minds are on their favorite football or baseball teams, fantasies about a Hooters waitress, getting the kids back to school, finding a job, keeping their job, the latest music video, the next episode of their favorite reality TV show… everything and anything but politics. The vast majority of Americans won’t even give the midterms serious thought until mid-October. It’s a national shame.

Most survey savvy folks know from experience that saying that they do not intend to vote is the easy way to get out of taking the survey, and and many more say they aren’t voting to express fristration when they really will when the time comes. So the likely voters taking the poll are the committed activists on both sides, along with lonely people who are glad the researcher called just to have someone to talk to. They are not at all predictive of who will actually vote.

Now the danger here is this. The lopsided results in most polls demonstrate that more of the activists on the right are engaged than of those on the left. If the left gets busy, there is still ample time to recover.

One disparate finding was the nine point spread that people think the GOP will take the House and the Senate. It seems contradictory that the same people split evenly on the generic ballot would yield this result, but there’s a reason. The MSM have been saying just that, over and over again, based on the inaccurate generic ballot polls, and that’s what people are hearing.