The key focus group of voters that politicians try to target is moving to the blue side of things:

Independent voters overwhelmingly favor Democrats to take over the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 7 election and back them on major issues, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll said on Monday.

The independents surveyed said they plan to support Democratic congressional candidates over Republicans by a roughly 2-to-1 margin — 59 percent to 31 percent — the largest gap in the poll this year, The Washington Post said.

Forty-five percent said it would be good if Democrats recaptured the House majority, 10 percent said it would not and the rest said it would not matter, the newspaper reported.

With Republicans fighting to retain control of the U.S. Congress, the choice of independents may be pivotal because most Democratic and Republican voters said they plan to support their party’s candidates, the newspaper said.

Of course a strong GOTV effort by either party can quickly minimize the impact the Independent voter has on an election. Luckily I don’t see a major motivating issue for the Republicans this year. They can no longer go around trying to motivate the religious base, because they have been faced with 14 years of broken promises. The war-hawk base is also not that motivated – mainly because Iraq is in such turmoil. The conservative base has given up on this group a long time ago. With runaway spending and record high deficits, their very values have been destroyed by the GOP controlled Congress.

When you look at the left they do have a motivating factor this year – control. The Democrats have been waiting a long time to regain control of the House and this is the most promising year yet. That right there is enough of a motivation to get Democrats out to the polls. Of course we still need to do the final steps to insure that happens and everyone can always help here.