Tag: Polls

Rumblings: The Tea Party’s Over My Friend

Trish

538Poll

Dumb gets old quick, according to a recent CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll. The better we know the Tea Party, the less we like it. Here’s how those surveyed rated the movement that gave us Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, former Alaska partial-term Gov. Sarah Palin, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, among others:

    Favorable: 32%
    Unfavorable: 47%
    Never Heard Of: 7%
    No Opinion: 14%

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight took these results and combined them with earlier polls to show a trend tea baggers can’t deny. With each passing day, their approval numbers go down, down, down.

Silver concludes that Republicans, who scored 44% favorable and 48% unfavorable in the same CNN poll, have the most to lose if the tea baggers get dunked.

I’ve long been of the view that the Tea Party, despite nominating poor candidates in a couple of key races, was a significant net positive for the G.O.P. in 2010, both because it contributed to the “enthusiasm gap” and because it helped an unpopular Republican Party to re-brand itself in never-out-of-style conservative draping. But if the Tea Party ain’t over yet, the point in time at which it was an electoral asset for Republicans soon may be.

Poll: Whopping 65% of Wisconsin Voters Want Walker to Compromise

Jon Ponder

A new poll by a right-wing group based in Wisconsin finds nothing but bad news for the state’s GOP governor and his union-busting crusade. Despite the conservative bias of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which sponsored the poll, the results clearly show that Gov. Scott Walker has lost support across the board in his campaign to end collective bargaining rights for state employee unions.

The most compelling example of eroded support for Walker may be on the question of compromise. When asked whether “Gov. Walker should stand strong for the plan he has proposed no matter how long the protests go on, OR Gov. Walker should negotiate with Democrats and public employees’ unions in order to find a compromise solution” — just 33 percent felt he should stand strong while 65 percent chose compromise.

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New Poll Refudiates Palin’s Boast About Beating Obama

Trish

22

Number of points by which Pres. Obama would lead Sarah Palin were the 2012 election held today, according to a new NBC/Wall St. Journal poll. Despite the reality star’s recent boast that she could beat Obama, 55 percent of those surveyed said they would support the president, while only 33 percent would vote for Palin. The number refudiates Palin’s claim, and represents a surge toward Obama, since a poll earlier this month gave him only 8 points over the former partial-term governor.

No Honeymoon: Public Approval of GOP Midterm Win Is Down 22 Points from Approval of Dems’ Win in 2006

Jon Ponder

chart-enthusiasm-gap-over-gop-winSwing voters gave Pres. Obama and the Democrats in Congress less than 22 months to resolve the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the 1929 financial meltdown that took nearly a decade to resolve.

Now polling suggests they’ll give incoming GOP House Speaker John Boehner an even shorter honeymoon, if he gets one at all.

These voters demand instant gratification, and poll data suggests that Boehner and his caucus, which will include dozens of tea-bagger political neophytes and clueless amateurs, will have a very few months to put the economy right.

As has been noted here before, in the run-up to the midterms, poll after poll showed that Republicans in Congress were the least popular political entities among voters. Their disapproval ratings were consistently higher than the Democrats, sometimes by double-digit margins. And yet, at the same time they were expressing their disdain for Republicans in Washington, poll after poll showed that non-aligned voters were committed to putting them back into power.

Exit polls from Nov. 2 showed that, generally speaking, 95 percent of Democrats voted for Democrats and 95 percent of Republicans voted for Republicans. However, no-party voters tilted to the GOP by roughly a 60/40 margin.

And now that the dust is settling from Election Day, it appears that less than half the public is happy that the GOP is back in power, a significant drop from the nearly two-thirds who were happy in 2006 when the Democrats won both houses of Congress, according to a new poll from Pew Research:

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‘Un-Enthusiasm Gap’: At Least 5% of Voters Disapprove of, But Plan to Vote for, Republicans – Means GOP May Get Majority But No Mandate

Jon Ponder

Earlier I posted a recap of FiveThirtyEight.com pollster Nate Silver’s scenario in which, despite all the dire predictions, Democrats could hold onto enough seats today to retain control of Congress.

If, say, 40 million people vote today, at least 2 million and 3.2 million of them will be voting for candidates from a party they don’t like.

Although Silver did not address it, there is another statistical anomaly out there that has remained consistent in the polling recently: an “un-enthusiasm gap” among people who say they hold a lower opinion of Republicans than Democrats but plan to vote for Republican candidates nonetheless.

Poll after poll has shown that Republicans are the least popular political entity out there.

In early September, polls found favorability ratings for Republicans in the low 20s and Democrats in the mid-30s — while concurrent generic ballot results showed GOP candidates up by five to 10 points or more. What this meant was that as many as 10 to 15 percent of voters back then were saying that they planned to vote for candidates representing a party they did not like.

Huh?

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