Democrats make gains in new polls, but the political climate still favors Republicans

New polls suggest a modest but late-arriving rebound for Democrats entering the campaign stretch, as party leaders urgently call for voters to engage in the midterm election.

Analysts said turnout levels still could decide whether Democrats have a chance to preserve their congressional majorities in the Nov. 2 election. But political experts cautioned that with independents leaning heavily toward Republicans, mobilizing the Democratic base may not be sufficient.

A Washington Post-ABC news poll released Tuesday was the latest to offer hope for Democrats. On the question of which party’s candidate voters would support, the Republican advantage dropped from 13 percentage points to 6 percentage points in a month, mirroring the swing toward Democrats in a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll a week earlier.

Each poll attributed the gains in part to Democratic voters becoming more enthusiastic about casting their ballots. It also follows a new push from the White House to counter Republicans after the launch of their “Pledge to America.”

“I think the president has made the case effectively about why people need to be involved and what’s at stake, and I think those trends will continue up until election day,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.

Even as Democrats show improvement, the Republican advantage in the so-called enthusiasm gap is still in double digits by most estimates.

A Gallup poll found this week that Republicans led by just 3 percentage points among all registered voters surveyed. But when accounting for different turnout scenarios, Gallup found the GOP advantage ranged from 13 to 16 percentage points, a margin likely sufficient to ensure a Republican takeover of the House.

Latino registered voters, though favoring Democrats in their local House races by 65% to 22%, are less motivated to cast a ballot than other voters, according to a Pew Hispanic Center survey released Tuesday. Only 51% of Latino registered voters said they were certain they would vote, compared with 70% of all registered voters.

To counter such findings, the Democratic National Committee and the White House are making a renewed push to so-called surge voters — the young and first-timers — who backed President Obama in 2008 but who are usually less reliable in other years.

Obama will headline the second of four major rallies in Philadelphia on Sunday. Next week, he will participate in a youth town hall meeting to air commercial-free on six cable networks, including MTV.

Republicans say that any gains being made by the Democrats represent the natural tightening that happens as base voters return home, but that the underlying political climate still heavily skews to the party out of power.

“You can’t make up on turnout what you’ve already lost on message,” said Glen Bolger of the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies. In 2006, “Republicans said we’re going to turn out our base and that’s going to carry us. Guess what — our base did vote, but we still got slaughtered among independents.”

Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank in Washington, similarly argued that Democrats’ efforts to rally the base were not enough.

“Mathematically, it’s just impossible, no matter how many liberals you mobilize, to match the number of conservatives that Republicans are mobilizing,” said Anne Kim, the group’s domestic policy director. “Populist rage is not what motivates moderates to come to the polls. There are so many people who are just so disgusted with the system they’d rather sit at home, and that’s the most dangerous place for Democrats to be.”

michael.memoli@latimes.com