It’s a slow day in Congress on Friday, and with little happening in Washington State today around healthcare, I thought this would be a good time to spend some energy looking at some polling data.

There is lots of talk about the increase in support nationwide for a public option, and reform in general. However, there are a couple of other very important numbers out there worth watching.

Rasmussen Reports posts their daily presidential tracking poll numbers, as seen above. The graphic tells the story of the “hard” level of support vs. opposition for the president. There is a lot of wiggle room here insofar as this only depicts his “strongly” support/oppose numbers – and there’s a great deal of pro-Obama voters still “somewhat” supportive (47%).

That the strongly oppose numbers are rising is not uncommon – I think everyone expects it, actually, regardless of healthcare as an issue, during a new president’s first year. The drop, however, in the strongly supportive numbers is more concerning. One would expect that to soften over time, and as such doesn’t mean the sky is falling over the administration.

That said, as these numbers continue to erode, Obama will watch them closely. More on that in a second.

Here are the other critical numbers.

Just 15% of voters now give Congress good or excellent ratings, while most (53%) rate the legislature as poor. Those ratings have held relative steady for the past few months but are noticeably worse than those found in May. At that time, 23% gave Congress positive ratings while 44% rated its performance as poor.

That’s not good for Congressional Democrats heading into next year’s mid-terms. Now, here’s the real punchline…

For nearly two years, economic issues have held the top spot in terms of importance among voters.

But the latest national telephone survey shows that 83% now view government ethics and corruption as very important, placing it just ahead of the economy on a list of 10 key electoral issues.

That is a devastating turn of events for Democrats heading into next year’s elections. If the issue on voters’ minds next year is corruption, it won’t matter what Democrats did with the stimulus, with SCHIP, healthcare, in Iraq, etc. Those don’t allay concerns about ethics. To some degree they can even work against the ethics issue.

Mid-terms are almost always bad for the party in the White House, particularly if they also control Congress. 2006 is only the most recent example. 1994 was an even better one. (Though admittedly 2002 was an exception with the politics of 9/11 at play.)

So what does that mean for healthcare reform? Good question.

1. Democrats absolutely must pass something and declare victory. Even if the compromise bill is very, very watered down, something must pass for Democrats to point to. If they can’t claim “effective governance” at the polls, ethics will be very difficult. The inability of Clinton to even get a vote on reform in 1993-94 appeared to the public that Democrats just couldn’t govern, and that is a very good reason to vote against them.

2. They need to do it fast. The longer it takes for reform to pass (and victory to be declared), the more the numbers above are likely to deteriorate for Democrats and the longer they will be unable to work to move ethics off the voters’ collective mind. Reform in 1993 dragged well into 1994. It undermined the ability for Congressional Democrats to campaign effectively on other issues when for the first 4-5 months of the year, healthcare was in the headlines.

3. If Democrats want to be re-elected in 2010, they need to help Obama out. This is essentially the more direct point drawn from the above. Congressional Democrats need Obama to be popular in 2010 for him to be able to help them stand against the tide of history and hold their seats in tough districts. The longer reform is unfinished, the more Obama’s numbers erode. The worse Obama’s numbers are, the less effective he will be with swing voters in moderate-to-conservative districts that Congressional Democrats need to hold. The less effective he is in supporting Dems in those districts, the more likely Republicans will pick up a wide swath of seats. The more likely that is to occur, the more likely we’ll see Speaker John Boehner in 2011, a Republican majority in the House, and a severely wounded president heading into his own re-election in 2012.

Bottom line: The sooner reform is completed, the better it is for Dems in 2010.

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