Does Obama really have an edge on enthusiasm?

A new Washington Post/ABC poll shows an ostensibly surprising twist in the presidential race: Barack Obama's backers are now more enthusiastic than Mitt Romney's.

Among registered voters, 93% of the president's supporters say they're enthusiastic about supporting him, while just 75% of Romney's backers say the same.

The bad news for Mitt is that those are eerily similar numbers to 2008 when 91% of Obama backers were enthusiastic, while just 74% of McCain supporters said the same about McCain.

Now... here's where the poll might be missing something -- I don't think McCain supporters were nearly as enthusiastic about voting against Obama as Romney's are about voting against the president.

This poll doesn't make the distinction, but in other polls, we've seen that Romney voters are primarily enthusiastic about voting against the POTUS and not about voting for Romney.

That's a real, intense kind of enthusiasm that the Washington Post/ABC poll fails to capture, probably because they failed to ask the question.

So with that context, the enthusiasm gap is slightly less worrisome for Romney than it first seems. Romney might not be jazzing up his supporters, but as we've seen over and over, Obama is making Republicans plenty enthused about voting for the anti-Obama.