Negative Democrat Poll Trending Continues … Gallup Poll, Donkey Support Dips Below Majority Level in 2009

The polling slide continues …

Polling is all about trends not the snap shot in time that they indicate. Once again a Gallup poll shows a damning trend for Barack Obama and Democrats heading into the 2010 and 2012 elections. For the first time in 3 years, Democrats fall under 50% in party affiliation.

The year 2009 marked the end of a three-year run of majority Democratic support among U.S. adults. Last year, an average of 49.0% of Americans identified as Democrats or said they leaned Democratic, the party’s first yearly average below 50% since 2005.

What is telling about these polling numbers? All of the gains that Democrats had made during the GWB administration have evaporated.

The five-point party gap in the fourth quarter of 2009 represents the smallest Democratic advantage since the second quarter of 2005. Thus, the gains the Democratic Party made in public support during the last several years of the George W. Bush administration have disappeared.

Also, the Rasmussen poll shows that Republicans now have a 44% to 35% lead in the Congressional generic ballot, the largest lead in quite some time.

There has also been a rise of people who consider themselves Independents in 2009 and from all polling it shows that the once strong backing that Democrats and Obama received in the past is now strongly against them.

Rise in Independence in 2009

One other notable development in the 2009 party identification data is an increase in the percentage of Americans identifying themselves initially as political independents (regardless of whether they subsequently said they leaned to either party). The 36.6% of Americans who identified themselves as independents in 2009 was up from 34.9% in 2008.

It is not unusual for the percentage of independents to increase in a non-election year. But the 2009 average did mark the second-highest percentage of Americans calling themselves independents in the just-completed decade, eclipsed only by the 38.6% average of 2007.