"Republicans have a 49%-44% edge over Democrats in a generic ballot, a key 2014 midterm election indicator..."

"... according to a new CNN/ORC International poll," says a new Breaking News email from CNN. Here's the article:

Two months ago, Democrats held a 50%-42% advantage among registered voters in a generic ballot, which asked respondents to choose between a Democrat or Republican in their congressional district without identifying the candidates. 

Whoa! 2 months ago the Dems were up by 8 and now they are down by 5? That's a 13-point change in the spread.

That result came after congressional Republicans appeared to overplay their hand in the bitter fight over the federal government shutdown and the debt ceiling.

So the Republicans were unusually low at that point. By the way, it's absurd for journalists to adopt the term "government shutdown," at least not without putting it in quotes. It's an inflammatory propaganda term. Obviously, the government didn't shut down.

The 13-point swing over the past two months follows a political uproar over Obamacare, which included the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov and controversy over the possiblity of insurance policy cancelations due primarily to the new health law.

Why say "botched rollout" and not "collapse" or "utter ruin" or something more dramatic, equivalent to "shutdown"? You know, it's not just the "rollout," which suggests the initial stages of the system as it lumbers into motion. And "botched" suggests some pesky messiness that can be forgiven.

"Virtually all the movement toward the GOP has come among men," CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. "Fifty-four percent of female voters chose the Democratic candidate in October; 53% pick the Dem now. But among male voters, support for Democratic candidates has gone from 46% in October to just 35% now."

Younger men, I take it. They are ones for whom the reality of Obamacare most diverged from the hope-and-dreams.

According to the poll, only three in 10 registered voters say they are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting for Congress next year.... Democratic voters seem particularly unenthusiastic about voting, and that is likely to benefit the GOP. Thirty-six percent of Republicans say they're extremely or very enthusiastic about voting. That number drops to 22% among Democrats.

Another GOP advantage is the President's standing with the public: 55% of registered voters say that they are more likely to vote for a congressional candidate who opposes the President than one who supports him and four in 10 say they are likely to vote for a candidate who supports Obama.

Get ready for the anti-Obama Democrats. What will they look like? Perhaps they'll grind away at him from the left on issues like the NSA surveillance and drone warfare. They could say Obamacare was devised as a sop to Republicans who outrageously avoided all responsibility for it when it failed, and single-payer was always the only good answer, and it's where we must go now.