A senior Senate leadership aide asked me yesterday, “Is it cool to be a Republican again?” He was, of course, responding to the array of positive public opinion data released in the last week following the GOP convention. I’m sure most Americans rarely conflate “Republican” and “cool,” but some recent data suggest the party brand is on the mend. The first piece of good news comes from Gallup. Republican party identification has surged in the wake of the St.Paul convention. Pre-convention numbers looked like this (including those who say they “lean” toward one party or the other): 53 percent indentified as Democrats and 39 percent as Republicans. Post-convention? 47 percent Republican, 48 percent Democrat. Gallup also reports pre/post convention party ID data for five presidential elections since 1992. The 2008 Republican bump is the largest, while the Democratic dip (53 percent to 48 percent) marks the only time party identification has declined from the pre-to-post-convention period. Read the full Gallup analysis here. I also looked at the generic ballot data from CNN/Opinion Research Corporation and USA Today/Gallup. Here too, Republicans show significant improvement since earlier in the summer. For example, CNN shows the GOP down 10 points on the generic ballot in June, but down just three points post-convention. USA Today/Gallup finds a 10-point GOP deficit in June and actually a five-point Republican generic ballot lead in September (these numbers seem almost unbelievable, and could be chalked up to a aberrant sample, but the trend is consistent with other polls). Finally, the same pattern emerges in the parties’ favorable/unfavorable ratings. In March of 2008, the above mentioned CNN poll revealed Democrats with a 21-point net favorable rating (subtracting favorable from unfavorable). By September, it has dipped to +11. The same comparison for the GOP went from a -15 net fav/unfav margin in March 2008 to +3 in September–an 18-point positive swing. It’s unclear if these pro-Republican shifts will last. But the McCain/Palin boomlet, along with Democrats’ inability to legislate in areas such as energy, has boosted the Republican Party–at least temporarily.
