Poll Watch: Democrats not slipping

So a new Democracy Corps poll (that would be guys like Stan Greenberg and James Carville) is kind of interesting. They've been doing a poll that they describe as "kind of an experiment," where they ask about both the "generic" ballot and the candidates by name in 50 key districts. From the summary:

RE: STRONG DEMOCRATIC RESULT IN FINAL 50-DISTRICT
SURVEY (pdf file)

This final survey of the 50 competitive Republican districts, dialed Thursday night, Saturday morning and Sunday night, shows the Democrats with a 5-point margin in the named congressional ballot (49 to 44 percent).1 That is down 2 points from the middle of last week and up 2 points from a week ago. In fact, the Democrat has polled 49 percent in virtually every survey in October, while the Republican has been stuck, now at 44 percent. When the undecided is allocated based on leanings, the Democrats carry this Republican territory, 51 to 46 percent. With the Democrats ahead in the most vulnerable and safest tiers of seats, Democrats should expect to carry the great majority of them.

So what should people make of the national polls with the Democrats’ congressional generic margin slipping in most polls and overall?

First of all, they should insist next time that pollsters use the named ballot, because that has proven stable, with a slight shift to Republicans at the end (more on that below). In these 50 districts where a gazillion dollars has been spent educating the voters on the actual candidates, the generic ballot – always better for Democrats than the real ballot with known incumbents – suddenly aligned with the real ballot in the final weekend. The generic margin went from average of 10 over the past week to 4 points (4.4 to be accurate). The Democratic generic vote was actually stable but the engagement and partisan polarization has led Republicans to align their generic responses with their real vote at the very end.

This makes sense considering most knowledgeable observers of these things tend to caution about reading too much into the generic ballot polls in the first place.

I was never a huge poll junkie anyway. Reading cross-tabs is about as much fun as cleaning tile grout, to me at least. Just thought I would throw this out there for you tile cleaners. Go drop off or mail your ballot. It's just rain, what you made out of sugar?