A new Washington Post-ABC News poll out Tuesday contained a raft of bad news for Democrats, but the guests on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews Wednesday night tried their hardest to spin the few Dem bright spots in favor President Obama and his majorities in Congress.

Joan Walsh from Salon in particular made an interesting claim that the poll shows 58 percent of the American public thinks Barack Obama is “just right ideologically or maybe even a little too conservative.”  Yes, you heard correctly, America thinks Barack Obama is a little too conservative.

WATCH JOAN WALSH SAY BARACK OBAMA MIGHT BE TOO CONSERVATIVE

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Give Chris Matthews some credit, he was at least skeptical that the poll could contain such positive information for Democrats in this political atmosphere. It turns out he had some reason to doubt the results as certain liberties were taken with party identification that significantly shifted the results leftward.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air notes that while WaPo-ABC gives Democrats an eleven point advantage in partisan identification, other polls like Gallup have that gap narrowed to a meager one point. This means on key questions, such as which party is trusted more, Democrats did significantly better than what one might expect.  Morrissey explains:

“Why did Obama and the Democrats still manage to hold more trust over their GOP opponents?  The pollster talked to more of them, that’s how — and more of them than they did in the last poll, relative to Republicans.  In the March 26th poll, the WaPo/ABC sample had a D/R/I split of 34/24/38, giving Democrats a partisan advantage of 10 points in the poll.  This time, the sample’s split went 34/23/38, and even the independents split in favor of the Democrats, 19/17, up from 17/17 last month.”