A new new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds the opposite of what Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz and some conservatives are saying: Republicans are NOT winning the argument on a government shutdown but are losing ground. And they’re losing it on several fronts.
The Republicans in Congress have lost ground against Barack Obama in blame over the government shutdown, with Americans expressing increasing criticism of both parties in Washington, while the president’s avoided that rise in public ire.
Seventy percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll disapprove of how the Republicans in Congress are handling the budget negotiations, up 7 percentage points from a week ago. Far fewer, 51 percent, disapprove of Obama’s approach, essentially unchanged in the past week.
GO HERE to read the PDF and see the charts.
The Democrats in Congress remain between the two: Sixty-one percent disapprove of their handling of the budget breakdown, up 5 points in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates.
In another way to look at the results, Obama’s gone from 41-50 percent approve-disapprove last week to 45-51 percent now – a 9-point negative margin then, a similar 6-point negative margin today. The Democrats likewise show little change overall (from a 22- to a 26-point negative gap). But the Republicans have gone from 26-63 percent approve-disapprove to 24-70 percent, an initial 37-point difference widening now to a 46-point negative result.
Most of the changes for both parties come from previously undecided Americans coming to a negative opinion of their work. But a challenge for the Republicans in particular is that their disapproval ratings for handling the situation have increased numerically across the partisan board, among Republicans (+7 points), independents (+5) and Democrats (+9) alike.
So I take back what I’ve written here on TMV and elsewhere:
The Republican Party is NOT rejecting consensus: it is creating it.
The Democrats, by contrast, receive an additional 9 points of disapproval among Republicans compared with last week, but with essentially no change among independents or Democrats.
On Obama, political crosscurrents in effect cancel each other out.
And this is particularly interesting: Republicans are flunking out in the poll among ALL IDEOLOGIES:
IDEOLOGY – Ideology, as well as partisanship, indicate difficulties for the GOP. Even among conservatives, 59 percent disapprove of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling the situation, including nearly half of “very” conservatives (47 percent), rising to 68 percent of “somewhat” conservatives. Nearly three-quarters of moderates disapprove as well.
Obama does far better among moderates – 30 points better than the Republicans in approval for his handling of the situation. And he remains far stronger among liberals than the Republicans are among either conservatives overall or the “very” conservatives in their party’s base.
It’s not surprising about the moderates: the word “moderate” has become one of the dirtiest words in today’s GOP. Call it a bias: many moderates dislike the dominant ideological force in today’s Republican Party because they have openly declared they hate them and want to purge them from the party. So no surprise there.
Nor is this good news for the GOP:
The Republicans also have lost ground at either end of the economic scale, moving from two-thirds disapproval a week ago to about three-quarters now both among Americans with household incomes less than $50,000 a year and among those with incomes more than $100,000.
Obama and the GOP do equally poorly among middle and upper-middle-income adults. But the Republicans are at three-quarters disapproval among women, have experienced a rise in disapproval the past week among young adults, and now are higher in disapproval compared with Obama even among whites, usually a much stronger group for the GOP.
On the other hand, it stands to reason that since he blames the shutdown on Obama and the Democrats, Cruz also has an exotic, new definition of what “winning” means.
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UPDATE: Meanwhile, a new CNN poll finds there’s plenty of blame to go around as Americans have concluded their political class lacks…class:
Most Americans say the government shutdown is causing a crisis or major problems for the country, according to a new national poll.
And while a CNN/ORC International survey also indicates that slightly more people are angry at Republicans than Democrats or President Barack Obama for the shutdown, it is clear that both sides are taking a hit.
The poll, conducted over the weekend, was released on Monday, nearly one week into the partial shutdown over a push by tea party backed GOP lawmakers trying to dismantle or defund Obama’s signature health care reform law.
According to the poll, 63% of those questioned say they are angry at the Republicans for the way they have handled the shutdown.
“But the Democrats are not getting off scot-free. Fifty-seven percent of Americans are also angry at the way the Democrats are dealing with the shutdown. And a 53% majority say they are also angry at President Obama,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “It looks like there is more than enough blame to go around and both parties are being hurt by the shutdown.”
But CNN notes the bottom line:
The CNN poll results are similar to those from a new Pew Research Center poll also released Monday and surveys from Gallup and CBS News/New York Times surveys conducted last week, which indicate slightly more people blaming – or angry at – Republicans than Democrats or the president for the shutdown.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.