We will be drawing down some troops. If the president wants to try to turn that into the beginning of a success, he actually, I think, has some opportunity.

It was a very different Republican Party in 2013. And so I think particularly the House Republicans are more confrontational, less willing to compromise even than the Republican class of '94.

California is going to be quite good for the Democrats. But the rest of the country is a draw.

I think the White House is filled with confrontation, and is doing things to continue it. The White House and congressional Democrats think that they have the upper hand. They look at the surveys, they look at the polls, they think the Republicans are going to get blamed.

What we're seeing early on is Democrats rallying around Al Gore, Republicans rallying around George Bush and the difficulty of anybody else to get any room in the race.

The Democratic coalition has changed. It includes environmentalists and women's groups. It's a very different party. And so labor is still a part of it, but it's not the dominant part that it once was.

The worst time to take a survey is in the middle of a cataclysmic event.