Gallup reports another political shift: more Americans now identify themselves as Republicans than Democrats:
Since the Republican Party’s strong showing on Election Day last month, Americans’ political allegiances have shifted toward the GOP. Prior to the elections, 43% of Americans identified as Democrats or leaned toward the Democratic Party, while 39% identified as or leaned Republican. Since then, Republicans have opened up a slight advantage, 42% to 41%, representing a net shift of five percentage points in the partisanship gap.
The chart further illustrates the point:
This isn’t unprecedented:
There have been similar “bandwagon” effects for the winning party in the past, including after the 1994 and 2002 midterm elections, when Republicans benefited, and after the 2006 election, when Democrats made gains.
Gallup sees this as an opportunity for the GOP:
The 2014 midterms were an unqualified success for the Republican Party. The GOP took control of the Senate and expanded its majority in the House, giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 2006. And that success has caused Americans to view the Republican Party more favorably than the Democratic Party, as well as to say congressional Republicans should have more influence than President Barack Obama over the direction the nation takes in the next year. Americans are also now more likely to align themselves politically with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party.
But will they take advantage of this second look or blow it?It is not clear how long these good feelings toward the GOP will last. That could be influenced by what Republicans do with their enhanced power. While they are unlikely to achieve many of their major policy objectives with a Democratic president in office, how they and the president navigate the key issues facing the nation over the next two years will go a long way toward determining where each party stands heading into the 2016 presidential election.
I’m predicting it’ll all boil down to whether the Republican Party wants to see this as a chance to govern and seek solutions, or whether it’ll continue to kowtow to what I call the talk radio/cable political culture in the kind of rhetoric and stances the party takes.
Clearly, the GOP has won over independents who aren’t happy with the performance of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. The GOP can lose those independents as fast as they gained it.
I’m also inclined to think that the GOP will do what pressures from the base and the conservative political entertainment media want it to do, not what it needs to do.
But Mr. Obama and the Dems don’t have the some of the clout they think they have at this particular point in time.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.