A Turning Point For Democrats?

It's too early to say for sure, but it's possible that the Republican wave has subsided.

by Charlie Cook
National Journal
Saturday, July 31, 2010

Very few people watch political polls more closely than I do. (Whether that's a good thing or suggests that I'm slightly neurotic is up for debate.) When you monitor surveys incessantly, you occasionally see results that you're unsure how to interpret. You don't know whether they signal a key turning point in public opinion or whether they're just a hiccup, a passing blip. Or perhaps the odd results are from an outlier poll, a statistical anomaly that is the political equivalent of a false positive medical test.

We're currently experiencing one of those periods of uncertainty. One interpretation of recent results is that the momentum in this critical midterm election has shifted and the Republican wave has subsided. Another interpretation is that it's too soon to tell whether much has changed at all.

For the weeks of July 12-18 and July 19-25, the Gallup Organization's weekly aggregation of daily tracking polls showed Democrats ahead among all registered voters on the generic congressional ballot test question by 6 points (49 percent to 43 percent) and 4 points (48 percent to 44 percent), respectively. Each poll canvassed more than 1,500 registered voters nationwide. For the uninitiated, the generic ballot test question tries to approximate what the popular two-party vote will be nationwide and, over time, it has closely corresponded to the outcome on Election Day.

(More here.)