Poll: Obama’s Support on Health Care and Afghanistan Declining
A new New York Times/CBS News poll brings two bits of bad news for President Barack Obama — and two silver cloud lining bits of good news.
The bad news is that public support for his handling of Afghanistan and health care is declining and his recent media and speech efforts seem to have done little to reverse perceptions. The good news: he still has strong personal numbers — and the Republicans are viewed even more negatively:
Taken together, the poll reflects the crosscurrents buffeting the president on every major issue. Americans still trust Mr. Obama and seem willing to follow him, particularly in contrast to Republicans. But he is not quite the commanding figure he was in the spring, and his policies do not enjoy the support they once did.
Here are some of the details:
President Obama is confronting declining support for his handling of the war in Afghanistan and an electorate confused and anxious about a health care overhaul as he prepares for pivotal battles over both issues, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
But Mr. Obama is going into the fall having retained considerable political strength. At 56 percent, his approval rating is down from earlier in the year but still reasonably strong at this point compared with recent presidents.
More Americans are starting to credit his stimulus package with having helped to revive the economy. And Mr. Obama retains a decided advantage with the American public over Republicans on prominent issues, starting with health care.
The Times notes that Obama’s campaign to whip up support has “appears to have done little to allay concerns. ” Many respondents said they remain confused over what Obama wants to do and what he is seeking to accomplish.
But the GOP has a problem, too: it is not being perceived as having an alternative solution:
But the poll suggests that Mr. Obama is in a decidedly more commanding position than Republicans on this issue as Congressional negotiations move into final stages. Most Americans trust Mr. Obama more than Republicans to make the right decisions on the issue; 76 percent said Republicans had not even laid out a clear health care plan.
Republicans are also coming across as being the ones who are nixing authentic bipartisan cooperation:
And by a lopsided margin, respondents said that Mr. Obama and not Republicans had made an effort to cross party lines and strike a deal that has the support of both parties. Two-thirds of respondents said they wanted Congress to come up with a bill supported by both sides.
On Afghanistan, the poll finds a “slip” in confident about how Obama has handled it. There is “tepid support” for mainting troop support and increasing it.
A majority of Americans do not want troops there for more than two years.
But the significance of this can’t be underplayed given the context: the Democrats are finding that they are having problems with fundraising, the Washington Post reports:
Democratic political committees have seen a decline in their fundraising fortunes this year, a result of complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers, who have been put off by the party’s harsh rhetoric about big business.
The trend is a marked reversal from recent history, in which Democrats have erased the GOP’s long-standing fundraising advantage. In the first six months of 2009, Democratic campaign committees’ receipts have dropped compared with the same period two years earlier.
The vast majority of those declines were accounted for by the absence of large donors who, strategists say, have shut their checkbooks in part because Democrats have heightened their attacks on the conduct of major financial firms and set their sights on rewriting the laws that regulate their behavior.
As the battle over President Obama’s effort to overhaul the health-care system reached a fever pitch this summer, the three national Republican committees combined to bring in $1.7 million more than their Democratic counterparts in August. The pair of Democratic committees tasked with raising money for House and Senate candidates — and doing so at a time when the party holds its strongest position on Capitol Hill in a generation — have watched their receipts plummet by a combined 20 percent with little more than a year to go before the November 2010 midterm elections.
The implications as the Post notes, are huge for the Demmies:
Large-scale defeats in the midterms could be a crippling blow to the ambitious agenda mapped out by Obama’s top advisers, particularly if they happen in the Senate, where Democrats caucus with a 60-seat filibuster-proof majority. The party will have to work furiously to defend at least six Senate seats and as many as 40 in the House, including many snatched from Republicans.
And it seems as if Democrats are falling into an old pattern: once in power they have tended to either fall into disunity (divide and lose rule) — or become complacent that now that they have power they don’t have to be energetic or smart enough to maintain it:
Democrats said a struggling economy is only partly to blame for the poor fundraising performance and acknowledged a more perilous problem: satisfaction among activists that the party now holds the White House, 60 votes in the Senate and 60 percent of the House.
“There was a little sense of complacency that set in despite our best efforts to warn people,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “We made it very clear: Beware.”
“Beware” won’t make a good campaign slogan in 2010 — particularly as polls continue to diminish Obama’s clout, even as his personal popularity remains high.
The GOP will look these numbers and increasingly feel it has little to fear from Obama or the Democrats: Obama because his numbers are down, and Democrats because once in power they don’t know how to or work hard enough to keep it.
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13 Responses to “Poll: Obama’s Support on Health Care and Afghanistan Declining”
[...] Reagan? JFK? Lincoln? John Adams? George Washington?* I sure as heck wouldn’t. No thank you. Poll: Obama’s Support on Health Care and Afghanistan Declining – themoderatevoice.com 09/25/2009 A new New York Times/CBS News poll brings two bits of bad [...]
“And it seems as if Democrats are falling into an old pattern: once in power they have tended to either fall into disunity (divide and lose rule)”
This statement created an interesting connection in my head. In a previous article a commentor mentioned that Afghanistan isn't so much a country, but more groups of tribes that live within a defined border.
Could it be that the Dem party is much in the same way. A bunch of groups that are more loyal to their tribe than they are the Dem party? They join together when oppressed by the Rep party, but spliter the second they gain control.
The problem is that Obama has placed himself and his reputation at risk by aligning with lib Dems in the House, which are well left of the mainstream and have alienated themselves from the mainstream and from other Dems. The overreach has reached the point of failure and fracture of the Dems (the GOP has been sidelined or routinely bypassed or suppressed by the Dems, and the GOP cannot be handily blamed this time).
Is this the same poll that showed that Americans favored creation of a public option by 65% to 26%? I would think that any analysis of the poll that omitted that fact, and its consequences, is rather incomplete.
No this is a more credible poll It had a 51/40 split which is within the realm of possibility.
It also included a question that asked:
“Do you think the federal government has a moral responsibility to guarentee health insurance for all Americans, or is that not the federal government's moral responsibility?”
47% said it was 48% said it was not.
I agree, further elaboration is warranted. This poll question and it's twin sister question, “Do you want a free lunch?” shows remarkably consistent public support in whatever decade it is asked. However, when the pollees comes to understand the free lunch is actually not free to certain income tax payers and employer sponsored plan enrollees, that the current free lunch recipients are told their lunches will be scaled back in part to pay for the new recipients and the remainder of the cost will be passed to the next generation and that the details of the free lunch plan will not be made public in advance of the vote…….curiously enough, the support for the free lunch program begins to sag a bit.
That is an awesome correlation. It would explain the current funk within the party – with blue-dogs, libs, and moderate dems.
Great post.
From the link. “On one of the most contentious issues in the health care debate — whether to establish a government-run health insurance plan as an alternative to private insurers — nearly two-thirds of the country continues to favor the proposal.”
It's the same poll.
All you are doing is reciting………let's hear your insightful explanation of why your chosen question polls high, but all surrounding questions barely get a majority, if not a net negative.
Ok, yes, of course, the number one reason is because Republicans made wise-ass remarks.
Now, how about reasons 2 and 3?
well, CO, just maybe people are looking at the despicable practices and soaring cost of their declining insurance coverage and want a public option for THEMSELVES, whether or not they think we the people should care about the health of we the people.
They asked essentially the same question worded differently and 65% favorable was the highmark (which the liberal paper noted) but it also went lower on other responses and even with more disapproving. So take from it what you will the actually questions are here:
http://documents.nytimes.com/new-york-times-cbs…
That 65% figure doesn't look very strong when other similar questions in the same poll give different results.
This is just a hunch:
I would bet a year's pay that if you asked this question in any poll that it would be near 90%:
Would you support legislation that regulated insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, the healthcare industry, and provides for tort reform if it cut healthcare costs by 40%?
I've always said that the above criteria would lower the cost of healthcare for everyone in the nation.
I wonder how that poll question would fare?
Thanks for the link, L. You bring up an important point about the wording of poll questions. And certainly there are many mixed messages in that poll. But there still seems to be a widespread understanding that the status quo is not sustainable. At the very least, it seems clear that at least 65% are open to the possibility of public insurance. I don't think the question was deceptive.