The Enthusiasm Gap that Wasn't

Pew is out with its final numbers on the 2010 midterms, and like other pollsters it finds a large enthusiasm gap, with the Democrats narrowly winning the generic congressional ballot among registered voters but losing it handily among likely voters. Indeed, this year marks the largest enthusiasm gap found by Pew since 1998, when it found likely voters a net 5 percentage points more likely to back Republicans than the broader population of registered voters, who like today actually favored the Democrats by a point.

But there's something funny about that 1998 election -- the one with an enthusiasm gap surpassed only this year. The Republicans actually lost seats in the House that election. This marked the first time in the history of America's two-party system that the President's party gained seats in the House of Representatives during his second midterm election.

Moreover, that projected enthusiasm gap didn't really appear -- or at least not nearly to the extent expected by Pew. While Pew saw the GOP winning likely voters by 4 percentage points, the GOP actually only carried the nation-wide popular vote for the House by less than a single percentage point.

Just because Pew overstated the enthusiasm gap favoring the GOP back in 1998, the last time it was nearly as large as it is supposed to be today, doesn't mean that it's overstating it again. And yet maybe it is.