Mickey Kaus & the Rasmussen Generic Congressional Ballot Poll.

Mickey’s asking why it went down to R+1 (41/40) this week, after being R+5 to R+7 for the last few weeks month, more or less.  While I can easily see le affaire Joe Wilson causing a point or two for the bounce among Democrats, I’m going to speculate (read: ‘guess’) that the main reason is due to the intersection of two factors:

1. Rasmussen’s Generic Congressional Ballot Poll is gathered over a week; in this case, September 7th through September 13th.
2. On September 9th, the (Democratic) President made a speech that had the immediate effect of improving both  support for the Democrats’ health care rationing bill and his own favorable numbers.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that a speech that had this effect could also have influenced the GCB Poll for last week.  Unfortunately for the Democrats, it is also not unreasonable to conclude that this influence might be as ephemeral as the (now-vanished) increased support for health care.  Seeing what the numbers are next week will be interesting.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.