Just a week after the respected pollster Charlie Cook wrote a column spotlighting rising concern among establishment Republicans about their party’s collapsing support among swing voters, a new survey from Public Policy Polling finds a 28-point shift away from the GOP since November among independents :
The key to this strong movement back toward the Democrats right now is the same as the key to the strong movement away from the Democrats last year — fickle independents quickly growing unhappy with the party in power. Exit polls showed independents supporting the GOP by a 19 point margin last year at 56-37. Now only 30 percent of those voters think that the Republican controlled House is moving things in the right direction, compared to 44 percent who think things were better with the Democrats. Given those numbers it’s not much of a surprise that independents now say they’d vote Democratic for the House by a 42-33 margin if these was an election today, representing a 28 point reversal in a span of just five months.
The poll found no good news for the GOP:
- 43 percent of voters said Republicans are doing a worse job running the House than Democrats did; just 36 percent said the GOP is doing a better job.
- 62 percent of voters said Republicans have either made things worse or failed to improve Congress.
- If the election were held today, 46 percent would vote for a Democratic candidate for Congress; 41 percent would vote for a Republican. “That five point advantage for Democrats is only a hair below the margin Republicans won by in the national popular vote last year. A victory of that magnitude for the Democrats next year would at the very least result in the party taking back a large number of the seats it lost last year, and it could be enough to take back the outright majority,” says PPP.
- When asked to choose whom they trusted run the government, voters preferred Pres. Obama over the GOP in Congress, 48-42.
The most surprising thing about this trend is that anyone is surprised by it. Swing voters, like all people of good will, are repelled by the Republican plans to balance the federal budget on the backs of the middle class, poor and seniors while giving yet more tax breaks to the super-rich and corporations.
It’s also likely that swingsters were as offended as Democrats and liberals by the tea party’s threats to shut down the government over funding for women’s health clinics, public broadcasting and pollution regulators.
The big unspoken factor driving the swingsters’ disaffection with the GOP is the fact that they were punked by the GOP during the midterm campaigns. Apparently, swing voters believed Republicans’ campaign promises that, if elected, they would focus like lasers on the economy and create jobs, jobs, jobs.
Instead, what Speaker Boehner & Co. have delivered since January is mostly gimmicks like reading the Constitution out loud and killing a green initiative in the Capitol Building as well as a reboot of 1990s’ culture war attacks on abortion and gay marriage. Not only have they not delivered on jobs — they haven’t even bothered to hold a hearing on employment — conservative analysts predict that the GOP’s budget cuts will trigger the layoff of between 700,000 and 1 million workers.
This latest poll is in line with an NBC/Wall St. Journal poll from early March that found wide support among voters for anti-Republican solutions to bringing the deficit down, like taxing millionaires (81 percent), ending the Bush tax cuts (68 percent) and cutting tax breaks for energy companies (77 percent).
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