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The Texas Blue
Advancing Progressive Ideas

Most of the Party is Over Here

Harvey Kronberg had a story with serious implications late in the day yesterday, dealing with a new survey of Texas citizens and party identification. While the population was comprised of Texans rather than likely voters, the results (and trends) are important: for the first time since Montgomery and Associates began running the survey three years ago, more people identified themselves as Democrats than Republicans.

According to the Quorum Report rundown, the numbers break like this, from a sample size of 1,053: 45.1 percent self-identified as Democrats, while 42.6 percent self-identified as Republicans. Independents accounted for 6.4 percent, and the margin of error was 3.1 percent.

So, now for the exciting stuff. The demonstrable trends indicate that while the discord within the Republican party and the increasing dissatisfaction voters have been feeling towards them in the last half of this year certainly doesn't hurt Democrats, the shift from Republican to Democratic ID has been underway for some time:

2004 2005 2006
Republican 54.7 49.2 42.6
Democrat 33.9 37.2 45.1

So, while you wouldn't want to use this as an indicator for how Generic Candidate X would do in any race, you can certainly view it as a solid idea of how the general populace is leaning, and the three year span, in my opinion, lends the trend some real legitimacy. This is a big deal, and represents some degree of verifiable proof that the environment is getting less hostile for Democrats.

More on this later.

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