As Kyle Drennen noted today, NBC political analysts and reporters like Chuck Todd deny that the Republican Party looks any better right now than they did after the government shutdown ended in mid-October.
No one at NBC is noticing that the latest CNN/ORC poll showed Republicans leading Democrats in the generic congressional ballot by five, 49 to 44 percent. Even the First Read political blog at NBCNews.com doesn't have a whisper of it. Other non-CNN networks covered it. On Weekend Edition Saturday on the morning of December 28, NPR political analyst Ron Elving wasn't avoiding that poll:
RON ELVING: Yes, they did, 49 to 44, which is quite a reversal from October when they were down by eight points in the midst of the government shutdown. So most everyone is going to attribute this to the unpopular, rocky, whatever you want to call it, semi-disastrous rollout of the Obamacare program in the last couple of months that's really put a bruise on the Democrats' brand much the way the government shutdown had put a bruise on the Republicans.
You could say the Republicans are ending 2013 on their highest note of the year.
(Wertheimer nervously laughs)
LINDA WERTHEIMER: That's the best thing that has happened to them. Well, 2014 looms. How are they shaping up for the midterms?
RON ELVING: The midterms look good for Republicans. They will almost certainly hold control of the House. The Democrats would need nearly 20 seats in that takeaway. That's a big order and particularly because the president's party, in this case the Democrats, tends to lose seats in the midterms, not gain.
On the Senate side, the Republicans are on the march. They need six seats to take back the majority in the Senate.They may or may not get there, but the seats are out there to win. There are a lot of red states electing senators, some with incumbents like Louisiana and Arkansas, North Carolina where the Democrats got a struggle, others where there's a vacancy, say, in a Montana or a South Dakota.
By contrast, NBC kept pretending the GOP will never recover from the shutdown:
On the December 28 Today, NBC reporter Kristen Welker warned: "Meanwhile, Republicans didn't fare any better in 2013. The GOP watched their poll numbers plummet after the public blamed them for shutting down the government."
On the December 30 Today, guest host Bryant Gumbel trashed the “GOP” shutdown: “I thought it was a false equivalency for people to say it was a government shutdown, a failure of government. It was not. It was a few individuals who were trying to extort the government.” His guest Jordan Roth of Culturalist.com quickly agreed: “A lot of our users put a lot of blame on Republicans.”
Back on December 1, Meet the Press host David Gregory found a CNN/ORC poll newsworthy as he shut down Rep. Mike Rogers (R): “Here’s the bottom line question which goes to, will this be fixed? Look at this poll from CNN/ORC back on the November 18th to the 20th. Will current problems facing the new health care law be solved? 54 percent do believe that it will be solved. That's a level of credibility and belief in the system that presumably is very important.”
