Not particularly in regard to this poll - but to all polls and trolls in general - I am so tired of hearing people whine about the (almost universal) inflated Democratic numbers regarding party affiliation in national polls. Take a look at this map showing the ten most populous states. The shades illustrate the margin between self-identifying Democrats and Republicans.
And here are the numbers:
CA - Democratic 44-31
FL - Democratic 41-36
GA - Republican 44-32
IL - Democratic 46-31
MI - Democratic 40-33
NY - Democratic 49-25
NC - Democratic 45-32
OH - Republican 37-36
PA - Democratic 51-37
TX - Republican 45-21
These ten states make up half of the US population. As you can clearly see, there is a significant Democratic advantage in many of these states. New York and North Carolina effectively cancel out Texas and Georgia, while Democrats in Michigan add more to the Democratic total. Oh, and then there's Pennsylvania, Illinois, Florida and California.
When comparing these numbers and projecting them upon a 2008 electorate, this would have resulted in approximately 4.2 million more Democratic voters than Republican voters among these ten states. This effect alone - on a hypothetically evenly divided electorate (party affiliation) throughout the other states - would move the national result from D=R to D+3.
While the remaining 40 states would favor Republicans somewhat more, there are obvious advantages for Democrats when it comes to increasing nominal party membership (West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas) and of course disadvantages (D+9 is not the inverse of R+9 when it comes to voting patterns).
Still, Democrats have a national advantage beyond the inflated numbers, one that has clearly been demonstrated in the fact that Republicans have only won the national popular vote once in the past twenty years.
How on earth does that mathematically work when Texas and Georgia have far more population than New York and North Carolina?
The aggregation of those 10 states, even with those North Carolina numbers, comes out to 40% D 35% R 25% I. I weighted each state by the number of house seats in the next congress.
D+5 in the Democratic half of the country is not D+9.
