* I linked to this story before, but let’s flesh it out today. House Speaker Michael Madigan spoke to a DNC executive committee meeting in Chicago over the weekend…

…Madigan told the nation’s top Democratic leaders that the president’s proposed job-creation plan was important for the incumbent and the party heading into the 2012 elections.

“What’s important is that all of us, however possible in a public way, demonstrate our firm support for the president’s policy,” Madigan said. “It’s important for the nation. It’s important for the American people. It’s critical for the Democratic Party in the general election in 2012,” he said.

“Let’s think in terms of going to the polls today. We’d be in trouble. We’d be in serious trouble. So we have a window of opportunity between now and November 2012 to right the ship.”

The basic message here is that if Democrats don’t hang together then they will surely hang separately.

Heck, even if they do hang together there could still be big trouble if this economy doesn’t turn around soon.

* Whatever happens, Madigan was absolutely right about the peril of the moment. A few days after he spoke, the Democrats lost a New York special election in what had been a solidly Democratic congressional district. Nate Silver has some grim analysis for the party in a new post called “For Democrats, It’s 2010 All Over Again.” After admitting that this was just one election (along with three other specials since May) and pointing out several aggravating circumstances, Silver wrote…

Republicans have overperformed the [Partisan Voting Index] baseline by an average of 7 percentage points across the four races. That squares with what we saw in 2010, when Republicans won the popular vote for the House by an aggregate of 7 percentage points.

In other words, the four special elections, taken as a whole, suggest that Democrats may still be locked in a 2010-type political environment. Democrats might not lose many more seats in the House if that were the case, since most of their vulnerable targets have already been picked off, but it would limit their potential for any gains. And it could produce dire results for the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, where they have twice as many seats up for re-election.

It’s certainly possible to read too much into special elections to the House. Over the long run, they have had a statistically significant correlation to the outcome of the next general election. But the relationship is weak and frequently runs in the wrong direction, as it did in 2010.

* President Obama won’t do nearly as badly in Illinois as he will in other states. But he won a whole lot of areas last time that are now completely unobtainable. He and state Sen. Matt Murphy (R-Palatine) pulled about the same percentage of votes in Murphy’s Northwest suburban district. No way does that happen again. Also, Obama can forget about southern Illinois.

If things don’t radically change soon, Obama’s county map will look a lot more like Quinn 2010 than Obama 2008. And that means even with this new and much more partisan district map, legislative and congressional Democrats could still be in very big trouble here.

* Related…

* Press Release: Pollak lauds 2010 9th CD race as blazing trail for 2011 New York win

* Chuck Sweeny: George Gaulrapp plans heavy use of social media