Gallup reports its latest House of Representative survey results find 50 percent of registered voters would pick a Democrat in the fall election, while 43 percent would pick a Republican. That shows Republican gains from several months ago, when the margin was 52-to-40 for the Democrats. But that's not all the bad news for Dems, according to Gallup:

Typically, this early in the election year Gallup does not ask the "likely voter" questions that are designed to identify the subset of registered voters (RV) who are most likely to vote. Still, our experience over the past two mid-term elections, in 1998 and 2002, suggests that the RV numbers tend to overstate the Democratic margin by about ten and a half percentage points. Given that Democrats currently lead by seven points that could mean that among people who will definitely vote, Republicans actually lead by three to four points.

February is a long distance from November and, in modern politics, a two-hour, televised funeral can dramatically alter election outcomes. But the numbers have to leave leaders in the party of Howard Dean shaking their heads.