The Speaker and the Votes that Elected Her

Today I have two possibly overlooked items to report, both related to the new Democratic House and both discovered via MyDD:

• First,the latest CNN/ORC poll released last week included a job rating of new Speakerof the House NancyPelosi. As MyDD's JonathanSinger notes,Pelosi's initial rating (51% approve, 22%) not only tops the current jobrating of President George Bush, but it also exceeds the high mark forRepublican Speaker Newt Gingrich (39% approve, 35% disapprove). He hit that mark on an identicallyworded question asked on a Galluppoll conducted in January 1995, just after the Republicans took control ofthe House.

On a differently worded question, Pelosi
received a 44% favorable rating from the USA Today Gallup Poll earlier this
month, which is 13 points higher than all-time-high for her predecessor, former
Republican Speaker Dennis
Hastert.

• Andspeaking of the House of Representatives, MyDD diarist Adam T has gathered andtabulated all of the official and final vote count totals for all ofthe races for the U.S. House in 2006. In the 430 districts where votes were cast, Democratic candidates received52.8% of the vote, Republicans received 44.9% and other candidates received2.3%. As Adam notes, the totals donot include five districts in Florida whereDemocratic candidates faced no opposition - Florida does not put unopposedcandidates on the ballot.

The 7.9 point margin favoring the
Democrats is about a point higher than the margin I estimated in a two-part
series of posts I did in November that looked at the performance of national surveys
in estimating the national "generic" House vote.