By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist

A new Gallup poll issued yesterday is being called a “stunner” by political experts because it found at least a 13 point edge for conservatives among those likely to turn out on November 2.

According to John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, yesterday’s poll was it’s first 2010 “likely voter” poll of the year and its results “floored the political community.”

In the generic ballot question, which asks which party a voter would favor in a generic House contest, Gallup gave the GOP a 46% to 42% edge, Fund reports. The pollster then applied two different versions of its “likely voters” model – a high and a low turnout model. In the high turnout model, the GOP edge was a stunning 53 to 40 percent. In the low turnout model, conservative turnout was even more striking – 56 to 38 percent.

“That kind of margin in favor of Republicans has never been seen in Gallup surveys,” Fund writes.

“What should worry Democrats most is that the ‘low turnout model’ is typical of recent midterm elections. If the Gallup numbers hold up (and the firm cautions that ‘the race often tightens in the final month of the campaign’), some word more cataclysmic than ‘tsunami’ would be needed for the Democratic losses.”

Another expert, Michael Barone, co-author of the Almanac of American Politics, says either of the Gallup turnout models would produce “a Republican House majority the likes of which we have not seen since the election cycles of 1946 or even 1928.”

He claims the historical parallel may no longer be 1994, when the GOP gained 54 House seats, but more like 1894 when conservatives gained more than 100 House seats in  the middle of an economic downturn during the presidency of Grover Cleveland.

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