Why The Polling Shift?

Maybe... there hasn't been a shift in the polls so much in recent days, as the earlier polls (and pundits) overrated the president's popularity in the first place...

Performance counts, and no matter how you spin it: homes are still underwater, gas prices still up, and still some look ahead and have growing concerns of how exactly the country is going to finance the growing demographics eligible for benefits with an increasingly uncompetitive workforce...

Then there's the fact that if we look outward, better days do not appear to be on the horizon elsewhere in the world, in either the financial or military realms.

In short,
maybe people are simply getting more realistic about their immediate expectations -- as we've been encouraged to do, no? Artificially manufactured happiness and partisan spin only go so far in shielding people's eyes from the truth of what they see outside their doors this spring, in their immediate neighborhoods.

Some of us hate losing, despise mediocrity and "fixed" games.

Maybe things are picking up on Wall Street and in DC, but for the rest of us out here? Not so much... Perhaps the recent polls simply reflect that reality, minus any optimistic holiday uptick or winter burrowing isolation.