The generic ballot bias for Democrats

Terence Samuel:

This week Democrats recorded impressive election wins in Virginia and Kentucky, and the polls continue to show that Americans are ready for a change. President Bush's job-approval rating, at 34 percent, is setting endurance records, and according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, Americans say they would support a Democrat by a 50 percent to 35 percent margin over a Republican to succeed the president.

So why then are Democrats, all of a sudden, increasingly concerned about 2008?

Part of the answer can be found in that same WSJ/NBC News poll in which the Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is essentially in a dead-heat with her GOP counterpart Rudy Giuliani. In a direct match-up between the two of them, Clinton leads Giuliani 46 percent to 45 percent.

This is not how it was supposed to be. This was going to be an election that Democrats ran away with, the one that could salve the wounds of 2000 and 2004 and spare the country the agony of another nail-biter of an election night. If we were lucky, we thought it would provide some brief respite from the hand-to-hand political and cultural combat of the last two decades because we were going to vote on Iraq, and on that we were not so divided anymore. Well, so much for all that.

In truth, there was never any chance of a blowout. We know that whatever the political climate now, it is going to change once each party had a nominee. The Democratic strategy then was to tie the Republican nominee to Bush in hopes that the president's unpopularity would sink him. With Clinton looking the runaway Democratic winner, Republicans may have gotten the jump in that department.

"I think the '08 election is going to be about Senator Clinton and where she wants to take America," said Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. "So the landscape next year, in my view, is going to be about this new Congress and its presidential nominee ... and where they want to take America."

This is not necessarily a landscape that a lot of Democrats are really comfortable with.

Clinton's fumbles in the last Democratic debate -- on immigration and her seeming inability to give a straight answer -- threw into sharp relief the fact that the GOP nominee will have a fair amount of Democratic vulnerability to work with if she is the nominee.

The last debate raised a fair number of uncomfortable questions for Democrats, not all of them about Clinton. It was a nightmarishly familiar scene: the equivocating, tap-dancing candidate unable, at the critical moment, to say exactly what she believed -- think Al Gore on guns or John Kerry on abortion and the $87 million that he voted for before he voted against. It undermined the growing sense that Clinton had been remade into a tougher, more solid candidate, who, whatever her other issues, was going to come ready to beat the Republicans at their own game.

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The generic ballot has always had a Democrat bias, that bumps up against reality when you see the bad policies of Democrats against the good policies of Republicans that has resulted in a lot of GOP victories in presidential elections and congressional elections. That is because liberalism is not that popular and most Democrats have to pander to their liberal base while trying to act normal. that is what makes for the toe tapping stuttering by Al Gore over guns and John Kerry over the $87 million for the troops and Hillary Clinton over drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. On the generic ballot voters are not reminded of the evils of liberalism that is obvious when you put real candidates on the ballot. It is why Democrats deserve to lose.