Ready. Aim. Backfire!

What has 20 months of pushing ObamaCare, Cap and Tax, a $4 trillion tax hike and screaming "the Tea Party is racist and extreme" accomplished for Democrats?

Voters are now more likely to Democrats are controlled by extremists than Republicans, including must-win independents and Democrats themselves.

As reported by Alexander Bolton in this morning's The Hill:

Likely voters in battleground districts see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than the GOP.

This result comes from The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll, which found that 44 percent of likely voters say the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements; whereas 37 percent say it’s the Republican Party that is more dominated by extremists.

The revelations in a survey of 10 toss-up congressional districts across the country point to problems for Democrats, who are trying to motivate a disillusioned base and appeal to independents moving to the GOP ahead of the Nov. 2 election.

The polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland conducted the survey, contacting 4,047 likely voters by phone between Oct. 2 and Oct. 7. The margin of error for this sample is 1.5 percent.

Okay, so voters overall think Democrats are more likely to be controlled by radicals than Republicans. It's either a poll of a tiny sameple, or Republicans are skewing the sample. There's no way independent voters could see Democrats are more radical than Republicans after 20 months of pointing and screaming "Racist!" at anything that disagree with us.

The polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland conducted the survey, contacting 4,047 likely voters by phone between Oct. 2 and Oct. 7. The margin of error for this sample is 1.5 percent...

...Results for independent voters reflected the larger sample. Forty-three percent of likely independent voters said the Democratic party is more dominated by its extreme elements compared to 37 percent who though the GOP had fallen under the sway of extreme views.

Oh.

Well, at least Democrats realize Republicans are more radical than their own party.

More than one in every five Democrats (22 percent) in The Hill’s survey said their party was more dominated than the GOP by extreme views. The equivalent figure among Republicans is 11 percent.

Poopie.

The data surprised Democratic strategists and political experts in a campaign season when much media attention has focused on the battle between the GOP establishment and Tea Party-backed candidates such as Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware.

They said it suggests problems for a Democratic party seen as too liberal.

“That’s real trouble for Democrats,” said Jim Kessler, co-founder of the Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.

“All the press coverage has been about how these Tea Party candidates are fringe ideologues, and there have been high-profile examples of them proving the point,” he added. “Yet, still at this moment, you have independents saying, ‘I think the Democrats are little more extreme than the Republicans.’”

How bad is it? A majority of Democrats want their party to be more like the Republicans.

Fifty-eight percent of Democrats said they would urge the lawmaker they supported to “look for compromises across the aisle”; only 35 percent would rather urge their representatives to “stay firm on their principles.”

Kessler, of Third Way, said this is a sign that many Democrats think their party has shifted too far to the left in recent years.

“Even Democrats feel the Democratic Party needs to reach to the center,” he said. “There’s a fear that maybe Democrats overreached in the first two years. They should work to get something done but not fall on their own sword.”

So clearly Democrat party bosses realize they've gone too far toward socialism and are working hard to repair their trust with voters.

But liberal opinion leaders reject this argument.

Charles Chamberlain, political director of Democracy for America, a grassroots advocacy group founded by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, urged Democratic leaders not to abandon liberal principles to work with Republicans.

“Ask Americans if they want Democrats to compromise on any specific issue like healthcare reform, Social Security or tax cuts for the wealthy and the real-world answer becomes no,” said Chamberlain.

Big problem there, Charlie. A majority of voters oppose the Democrat proposals for "health care reform" and killing "tax cuts for the wealthy," and an increasing number are troubled with the fiscal unsustainability of Social Security. I guess Charlie's definition of "the real world" is downtown San Francisco.