The problem is that they don’t want to have to read ten thousand indignant emails, so they hid that as well as they could. The title (“State polls show gathering storm“) is nicely non-specific, the only actual politician quoted is a Republican, and then there’s this paragraph:
The dismal polling doesn’t reveal much about which political party will pay the price in November. And it’s hard to pinpoint how voters will react, since places like California, Connecticut and Rhode Island currently have Republican governors and Democratic legislatures. In Pennsylvania, the governor is a Democrat while control of the legislature is divided between the two major parties.
That was the paragraph that made me decide to go look up the state legislatures on Wikipedia, in fact. And, lo! Of the seven states mentioned in the article:
| State | Senate | House |
| California | Democrat | Democrat |
| Connecticut | Democrat | Democrat |
| Iowa | Democrat | Democrat |
| New York | Democrat | Democrat |
| North Carolina | Democrat | Democrat |
| Pennsylvania | Republican | Democrat |
| Rhode Island | Democrat | Democrat |
…the Democrats control all of the state houses/assemblies, and all but one of the state senates. Often by a lot. And while gubernatorial races will certainly have an effect on state legislature ones this fall, it remains that anti-incumbent sentiment will tend to hurt more the party in power. Particularly when the party in power favors the policies that are generating the anti-incumbent sentiment. To give just one example: we’re not seeing a mass movement out there calling for more governmental interference in the health care system – and believe me, the Left has been trying to generate one. While a Republican candidate or office holder may or may not be able to tap into the mass movement that is calling for less interference, it’s not precisely easy for a Democratic candidate to do so… and not very likely at all for a Democratic incumbent.
But, again: if the Politico actually wrote all of that out they’d get a ridiculous amount of hate mail. So they didn’t.
Moe Lane
PS: If that’s not enough to make you vote a party-line ticket in November, consider this: redistricting will be coming up, soon. Some of these legislatures are looking forward to the opportunity to eliminate troublesome Republican Congressional Districts. Hard to do that if they don’t control the legislatures…
Crossposted to RedState.
“PS: If that’s not enough to make you vote a party-line ticket in November, consider this: redistricting will be coming up, soon. ”
Exactly! I’ve forgotten who it was, but in a recent online commentary that got a lot of play, someone recently totally ignored this point. He suggested that it would perhaps be best if the Republicans did not gain control in Congress this fall while totally ignoring the implications a reduced Republican vote would have for the state legislatures which are soon to begin redistricting.