Race favors Democrats at moment, analyst says

09/27/2007

Democrats enjoy a favorable political climate next year -- if they don't blow it, pollster says.


By Bob Von Sternberg,
Star Tribune
September 26, 2007


Heading into the thick of the 2008 election cycle, the nation's preeminent pollster sees a political landscape tilted overwhelmingly in favor of the Democrats - but warns them not to start measuring the drapes in the Oval Office just yet.

Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, offered nuggets of insight dredged from his mountains of opinion-poll data Thursday at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute.

By almost every measure, "the Democrats have a very strong advantage - but they can't get too carried away," he said.

According to his analysis, three overwhelming trends work in the Democrats' favor.

Values: Kohut has found that Americans' political values have returned roughly to the same place they started in 1987, after conservative positions peaked in the early 1990s.

The belief that government can alleviate social problems has rebounded, as have an aversion to aggressive foreign policy and the perception of growing economic inequality.

Party ID: Democrats have been ascendant primarily because Americans have soured on the GOP. Four years ago, the parties were roughly at parity, backed by about 43 percent of the public. One measure this year shows the Democrats with a 60-35 percent advantage.

Bush: "We've never had a president with ratings as low as Bush's since Harry Truman in 1951," Kohut said. "Change is what the public is looking for, not continuity."

Even so, the front-running Republican candidates run "pretty evenly" in head-to-head polls with Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton. Kohut theorized it might be because they both "represent something the public is looking for - an agent of change."

The eventual Republican nominee will have to satisfy the party's base without alienating the independent voters he will need, Kohut said.