Polls: 9/11 politics of fear fizzles

Apropos the previous entries analyzing the political exploitation of fear in this country, new polls indicate the public have rejected that argument after a brief 9/11 uptick.

The graph above is from the online betting site Tradesports, and shows the likelihood of the GOP retaining the House has resumed a months-long free-fall, with a closing price of just 50.6 (ie., there is a 50.6% chance of retaining the House). Tradesports correctly called the electoral votes in all 50 states in the last election, as well as 33 of 34 Senate races (source).

You can see this more clearly if we look at the trading for the last month which has almost all been below 50%:


Heavy trading starting 9/22 9/12 pushed it upwards but that has since fallen off.

(However, the Senate is currently trading at around an 80% chance of GOP retention as it has been all year. It will be interesting to see if there's a break in the odds there.)

And a bevy of polls, notably Rasmussen put Bush below where he was before 9/11. He now has a 0.71 favorability/unfavorability rating (anything below 1.0 indicates unfavored: 41% approve, 58% disapprove).

Rasmussen also moved three state Senate races out of the toss-up category into the Democratic column: Ohio, Rhode Island, and Montana. They now peg it as 49 GOP seats and 48 Dem. seats with just 3 in play.

If you believe in rejecting the politics of fear, these developments are good news. But there's still 7 weeks till election day!