Poll coming this morning

And it’s not going to be pretty. Public Policy Polling will be releasing around 11am today the results of its latest poll in the governor’s race. We know from Tweets that the poll is going to show Deeds behind McDonnell by more than the 6 points the last poll showed.  Will it be as high as the 15 points SurveyUSA showed? We’ll find out soon enough. But there are other factors here to look at.

In a post on the PPP blog, the poll’s authors discuss the problem that bloggers and others have pointed to: a lack of enthusiasm among Democrats.

The problem is all in who’s motivated and planning to turn out- McCain supporters are at a considerably higher rate than Obama’s, and that means a healthy McDonnell lead.

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So there’s basically an 18 point enthusiasm gap for turning out this fall between McCain voters and Obama voters at this point. Deeds probably needs to bring that down to about five by bringing out 55% of Obama’s voters to win. The bad news is he’s not there right now, the good news is he’s got three months to get there.

It is that last sentence that I think we need to focus on. Let’s be real: Democrats suffered a bruising primary season, spending over $15 million to determine the nominee. Creigh Deeds, the winner, spent the least. If you recall, in the final days of the campaign, Deeds announced staff layoffs and husbanded his resources in order to pull out what many thought to be an improbable victory.

If Deeds had to lay off staff, it’s only logical that he came out of the primary lacking both money and staff. The result has been a couple of months of rebuilding both – and an appearance that the campaign has being doing nothing.

Bob McDonnell spent the early part of the primary season doing what Deeds has had to do over the last couple of months, and then was able to campaign – including running TV ads – during our primary as the defacto nominee.

That there is an enthusiasm gap should be, then, no surprise.

What matters is going forward. Are we going to wallow in our disappointment – with the Deeds campaign, with the fact that our guy didn’t win or whatever excuse we come up with – and allow McDonnell a cakewalk or are we going to help Deeds “get there?”

I know what I’m going to do.