Rasmussen reports:

The number of Americans identifying themselves as Democrats fell by nearly two percentage points in November. Added to declines earlier in the year, the number of Democrats in the nation has fallen by five percentage points during 2009. In November, 36.0% of American adults said they were Democrats. That’s down from 37.8% a month ago and the lowest number of Democrats since December 2005. … The number of Republicans inched up by just over a point in November to 33.1%. That’s within the narrow range that Republicans have experienced throughout 2009 — from a low of 31.9% to a high of 33.6%.

It seems that one-party rule hasn’t been kind to Democrats. For all of the media’s carping about the Republicans’ supposed incompetence, negativity, divisiveness, and lack of ideas, those hapless Republicans are more than holding their own against the party with the swellest president ever, that’s in charge of all the levers of power, and that’s responsible for a boffo stimulus plan that’s created or saved an unspecified number of jobs. Hmm. Perhaps the prognosticators who decided the GOP was headed for extinction or regional marginalization were a bit premature.

It seems as though it matters to voters a great deal what the party in power actually does. If the Democrats insist on running up the debt, spending with abandon, pushing a government takeover of health care and a cap-and-trade job killer, raising taxes, and doing everything to make job creation harder, then fewer voters are going to want to be on their side. That’s rather basic, yet the pundit class sometimes forgets that what matters to the vast number of voters, who are less obsessed with politics than they are, is what politicians do and what results they achieve. If Democrats can’t figure out how to allay voters’ concerns about jobs, debt, and the growth of government, they simply aren’t going to hold their market share.