Poll: Stimulus Supported Amid Growing Partisanship And Desire For Changes
A new Gallup poll finds that President Barack Obama’s stimulus package enjoys strong support — but Americans are rapidly returning to their traditional (and predictable) partisan positions and want the plan to be changed…bigtime.
And a new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that support for the plan is slipping. The reason: the plan is starting to lose independent voter support.
Gallup reports:
A strong majority of Americans (75%) want Congress to pass some version of President Obama’s economic stimulus plan, but this group is split down the middle on whether it should be passed as is or with major changes.
Naturally, support for the plan is highly partisan. Although few Republicans favor passing the plan as it is, more than 4 out of 10 say it should be passed with major changes, leaving only a minority of 35% of Republicans who say the plan should be rejected altogether. A majority of Democrats, on the other hand, say Obama’s plan should be passed as is. Independents mirror the attitudes of the nation as a whole, split down the middle about passing it as is or with major changes.
Meanwhile, optimism about the plan’s impact is not high:
Regardless of their attitudes about the stimulus plan, Americans remain significantly concerned that the plan would not stimulate the U.S. economy quickly enough…Moreover, Americans have fairly low expectations for the plan’s ability to turn around the economy. Just 17% say the plan would make the economy a lot better, while another 47% say it would make the economy a little better. Seventeen percent (including more than a third of Republicans) go so far as to say the plan would make the economy worse.
Rasmussen has this:
Public support for the economic recovery plan crafted by President Obama and congressional Democrats has slipped a bit over the past week. At the same time, expectations that the plan will quickly become law have increased.
Forty-two percent (42%) of the nation’s likely voters now support the president’s plan, roughly one-third of which is tax cuts with the rest new government spending. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 39% are opposed to it and 19% are undecided. Liberal voters overwhelmingly support the plan while conservatives are strongly opposed.Last week, support for the President’s plan was at 45% and opposition at 34%.
As they consider the size and scope of the $800-billion-plus economic recovery plan, 46% are worried that the government will end up doing too much while 42% worry that it will do too little (see trends).
And what has caused the shift?
According to Rasmussen, Republicans and Democrats aren’t changing their viewpoints much. They are seemingly locked in with their perceptions (which probably also have to do with each wanting “their side” to “win” since increasingly American politics boils down to the equivilent of a football game or wrestling match, versus the search to sit down and solve problems and put party labels aside).
The problem for Obama and the Democrats: they are losing the undecided voters:
However, support among unaffiliated voters has fallen. A week ago, unaffiliateds were evenly divided on the plan, with 37% in favor and 36% opposed. Now, 50% of unaffiliated voters oppose the plan while only 27% favor it.
Obama and the Democrats got in by decent margins due to getting a big chunk of independent voters. They’re losing them on this issue.
Why? Some will say it’s due to the plan’s flaws and say it’s packed with items that don’t fit a common sense definition of things that can immediately give a boost to the economy. Some will put the blame (or give the credit to) the line put out by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, that was picked up by GOP lawmakers. Some will say it’s due to the Democrats failing to get any Republicans to vote for it. Some will say GOPers wanted to do a solid no to hit the partisan hot button. Some will say Democrats wanted the GOPers to vote in a solid “no” to brand them as obstructionist.
And some will say that despite Obama’s communication skills and images of him meeting with Republicans that he needed to directly use the bully pulpit more than he has — that for all the campaign flash and charisma he is turning out to be one low key dude.
The danger to all: polls are snapshots in time.
If the stimulus fails in a Senate vote Wall Street could tumble some more — something that doesn’t happen due to the result of any political struggle that resembles football game or a wrestling match. So both sides and the White House have a stake in coming up with an agreement that both parties can live with and that a large number of Americans will trust and support.
The bottom line: the GOPers have made headway with their arguments, as Rasmussen shows:
While support for the plan has slipped, support for a recovery plan that includes only tax cuts – like the one proposed by House Republicans – has grown during the past week. Forty-three percent (43%) of voters support that approach while 39% are opposed. Though the topline numbers are virtually the same as support for the president’s plan, the partisan demographics are distinctly different. Republicans solidly support a tax-cutting recovery plan while Democrats are solidly opposed. Forty-eight percent (48%) of unaffiliated voters like the idea while 33% do not.
Voters continue to soundly reject a recovery plan that includes only new government spending without any tax cuts. Just 15% support such a plan while 70% are opposed. Survey data released yesterday showed most voters believe that tax cuts are always better than government spending. Other recent polling shows that 59% are concerned that government spending will increase too much.
This sagging support, Andrew Malcolm notes, is why Obama is about to embark on a media blitz that will include a TV appearance tonight.
FOOTNOTE: Polls may differ. People often pick the one that best supports their position. But the constant is: the present plan doesn’t have overwhelming support and needs to be altered.
Blog reaction is HERE.
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5 Responses to “Poll: Stimulus Supported Amid Growing Partisanship And Desire For Changes”
My vote (for what it's worth) “Major Changes”.
Drop the stuff that won't directly and immediately support the economy. You have time. Quit thinking to the next election and actually govern now in the best interest of the American people. If it works, if it pays off, they're goint to re-elect you. If you fail by padding too many fluffy issues in, they're going to replace you. Assure the liberals that their pet-fluffy projects will thrive under your continued leadership down the line. Assure the neocons that after the new deal stabilizes the patient, they may continue to exploit it after a year or so.
Then everyone will be happy. But if you're myopic and stupid now and err on the side of pleasing everyone at the expense of narrowing the focus to that one shot that will bring us back…you won't have to worry about your or any other jobs. They'll all be gone.
Just do the job you were elected to do and forget about your wealth and status for just one millisecond Congress.
Kudos for making the _real_ news evident here. First, that a natural supermajority (62%) is _not_ in favor of the stupid “stimulus” bill that exists currently. Only the smallest minority sufficient to constitute a substantial plurality — 38%, or approximately the fraction of the electorate that voted for Lincoln in 1860 or Clinton in 1992 — wants the package in its current form to be passed. These people are out of touch with the public as well as reality and — morality, given what's in the bill.
I'd accept some kind of stimulus, for most want one, but one with Major Changes.
Yes, as Silhouette says — get rid of the junk, make this purely a stimulus package, though I say some longer-term payoff items that can grow the economy can go in there. In fact, the area where most people are likely to agree on content in any stimulus package is on the presence of infrastructure items and projects. Roads, bridges, power lines — we can use them. Everyone can likely identify new projects that would benefit their location; in addition to knowing of such projects in other places, here in Detroit I can name one new-construction project that makes perfect sense (somewhat under ten miles in length). (Rudi: Complete the depressed freeway and convert Hall Road to one-way frontage roads from Van Dyke to Interstate 94, the same way it is depressed freeway west of Van Dyke past Merrill and Mound. The center strip along Hall east of there is multiple lanes wide and each side of that strip has three to five lanes, some of which obviously could be sacrificed for freeway right of way.) It's not pork or a gimmick when and where it makes sense to do it. (The only question in Detroit's case is how much it is merited compared with other such projects, many of which already have been planned and simply need funding, elsewhere.)
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=e…
There are bigger, niftier projects we could do. Los Angeles could use two 30+ mile all-new freeways to fill gaps in its network. And the Bay Area is long overdue for the Southern Crossing. (I wish we could revisit the lousy Eastern Bay Bridge project and do one or two other things I know of that are far better architecturally, too.) How about a BART line running between SFO and OAK airports and connecting the end of BART in the Peninsula to the East Bay viaduct or making Bay Fair into a transfer station and having the trains proceed to Dublin? How about extending the BART lines, including BART on the Peninsula to complement Caltrain, or running BART into Marin County?
* * *
The other important issue here, which I seized immediately and I suspect others such as Mikkel will, too, is the pessimism of the public. That's a recipe for more recession and for deflation, especially if there are more sales than there currently (already) are and people learn to anticipate lower prices in the future. That, in addition to increasing pessimism simply from observing the economy not getting better rapidly.
Recessions must run there course.
Stimulus will not work. Period. They never do. Its all political manuevering to try and win support for your party.
The bill passed by the house was simply “Voodoo Economics.” Here's hoping the Senate gets it right.
1. Debt must be paid.
2. Business must recoup their capital in the form of payments for services rendered and goods provided.
3. The piper was hired. Now its time to pay him.
Stimulus is not going to work. The fact that we gave banks money and now everyones complaining that those banks arent lending is simple economics. No ones borrowing. Hello. Who wants to borrow money in the midst of one of the most powerful recessions in decades? No one. The money is not going to waste. Propping up the banks will continue to make our nations economic health strong for the long run but it still will do very little to stimulate the economy.
There are many things to do and most of them are shoring up the fundamentals of this economy while we pay the piper.
Recessions must run their course. People need time to earn wages, and pay back what they owe. As debt gets paid down the workers free up money and will cautiously begin testing the waters of spending.
“Most of those checks will be put to use in paying down debt or equally important…..savings.”
It's an individual (and familial) virtue, which in a deflationary spiral is seen as a collective vice (the paradox of thrift — what's good ends up being seen as bad).
Note that if we got radical and issued large enough checks, people would largely be promptly satisfied with debt service, saving, and investments, and be moved finally to spend. Not that I advocate such radicalism, but I'm moved to ask aloud, if only rhetorically — or perhaps truly — given how much we've spent on the bailout and what we plan to spend now (and then, more later) on stimulation efforts, why not just issue each citizen a check for the per capita share of the total amount? How many thousands to millions would that end up being eventually, given division of the entire amount by approximately 150 million heads?
If we do spend on things, I advocate longer-term things like infrastructure that may not satisfy the impatient or the worried (Tom Daschle is no longer an Obama man, so we don't have to worry about hearing him again say as a public official that he is “concerned”), and to name something in my home area (which raises my interest; I'm not saying it has first claim to anything or even that it would pass a selection process in Washington), here's an infrastructure project that would benefit Michigan and Ohio. This is an example of something that could begin right now.
http://www.aep.com/about/i765project/docs/AEP-ITC-Whit...
http://www.aep.com/about/transmission/Michigan7…
“Right now I do favor a stimulus check.”
If for nothing else, as a “remedial dividend” or “shareholder's refund” given back to us taxpayers from Washington as a penalty for poor performance…
Obama and the Democrats got in by decent margins due to getting a big chunk of independent voters. They’re losing them on this issue.Why? Some will say it’s due to the plan’s flaws and say it’s packed with items that don’t fit a common sense definition of things that can immediately give a boost to the economy. Some will put the blame (or give the credit to) the line put out by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, that was picked up by GOP lawmakers. Some will say it’s due to the Democrats failing to get any Republicans thrift savings plan to vote for it. Some will say GOPers wanted to do a solid no to hit the partisan hot button. Some will say Democrats wanted the GOPers to vote in a solid “no” to brand them as obstructionist. The other important issue here, which I seized immediately and I suspect others such as Mikkel will, too, is the pessimism of the public. That's a recipe for more recession and for deflation, especially if there are more sales than there currently (already) are and people learn to anticipate lower prices in the future. That, in addition to increasing pessimism simply from observing the economy not getting better rapidly.