It's a damn good thing the Russians at Stalingrad and the Americans in the Bulge dismissed Gallup's foxhole polling of Nazi enthusiasm and instead redoubled their efforts at crushing the fascist bastards.
Which is to say, it's a damn good thing the former thought not like so many Democrats, who've effectively declared surrender before the midterm battle's engaged.
The "enthusiasm gap," reports Gallup, is now a yawning chasm: 50 percent to 25 percent in you-know-who's favor.
Less than two years ago rank-and-file Republicans and their battered party's leadership wandered in electoral wreckage, and many even wondered if the party could survive. Things were bleak -- really bleak, almost bottomlessly bleak. The GOP was pretty much cornered in the South, it was demographically doomed, it had plunged the nation in a Great Recession, it had no credible message or believable escape route, and on and on.
Now? Republicans are like Mel Brooks' Mongo decking the donkey. They got themselves pumped when they needed to be pumped -- when, that is, things looked bleakest. Sure, they accomplished said pumping through every conceivable corruption of political decency. But, they figured, this is war. So fuck it.
One would think -- or at least I would think -- that with a determined, unconscionable opponent like that, Democrats would be fighting mad and twice as pumped. One would think they'd set aside, for just a few months, their internal disputes and their ideological whimpering and their insufferable griping about having coming up short of glistening Platonic Ideals in policymaking.
Yes, one would think. But according to Gallup, one would be epically wrong.
There's still time, of course, for Democrats to muster and engage and rather easily defeat what is, after all, the numerically inferior enemy. Yet deep within the Democratic psyche there seems a masochistic tendency to play the victim; to whine about the bad guys and their assorted bad ways, while withdrawing from the battlefield and going home to pout.