Rove and Reinhard--Fuzzy Math?

Jeff Alworth

Robert Siegel: I'm looking at all the same polls you're looking at--
Karl Rove: No you're not!  No you're not!  I'm looking at 68 polls a week; you may be looking at four or five public polls a week that talk about attitudes nationally but that do not impact the outcome of these races....  Yeah, look, I'm looking at all these Robert, and adding them up, and I add up to a Republican Senate and Republican House.  You may end up with a different math, but you're entitled to your math and I'm entitled to the math.
--NPR interview, Oct. 24

Republicans apparently do have different polls, because the ones I'm looking at paint a different picture.  Recent polling by the Wall Street Journal--no excuse for liberal bias--puts GOP favorability at an all-time low.  In fact, the numbers are worse for the Republicans than they were for Democrats in 1994:

• Only 16% now approve of Congress; in '94, approval was 24%
• In 1994, there was an 8-point gap on the question of who should control Congress; this year Democrats enjoy a 15-point lead

In horse-race sites where pollsters pore over polling data (but perhaps not Rove's ultra-secret studies), the House is seriously tilting Dem and the Senate looks like a toss-up.  But never mind that, our own David Reinhard--maybe he's got the Rove data--predicts doom for the hopeful Dems:

You know all the media polls that show low Bush ratings and Democrats trouncing Republicans in the generic race for Congress? Often they're polls of adults rather than registered voters, or registered voters rather than likely voters, and this makes a difference. Also, the samples often don't reflect the electorate that's actually shown up to vote in the past few elections. For example, they often undersample Republicans or religious voters. They make for better headlines than pre-election intel.

And, although there's a lot of bouncing around in polls of those individual races, Republican prospects in contested races aren't nearly as dismal as the Democratic wave theory suggests. Indeed, they've brightened considerably of late.

It's not surprising that what exits Rove's mouth will two days later appear in Reinhard's column, so maybe there's no wave of Republican optimism here, just a loyal soldier mouthing the national message.  But it seems bizarre to hear this, in the face of overwhelming news to the contrary.  No one fears election day more than I do--disappointment has given me a Pavlovian reaction to the first Tuesday of November in even years--but this seems at best like stiff-upper-lippism in the waning days of a massacre.  Reinhard's offering to wager a lunch date that Republicans will win.  I can't see any reason not to take the bet.

By Jeff Alworth Oct. 26, 2006