rssNew Poll Says It’s Not 1994
Monday, October 11, 2010 at 9:25 am
- 4 Comments
For much of the year, both Democrats and Republicans have tried to avoid looking like big spenders, disavowing earmarks and trying to outflank one another on the issue of fiscal discipline — because that’s what they believe voters want to hear. A comprehensive new study of voter preferences, however, reveals it’s not nearly that simple:
A new study by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University shows that most Americans who say they want more limited government also call Social Security and Medicare “very important.” They want Washington to be involved in schools and to help reduce poverty. Nearly half want the government to maintain a role in regulating health care.
The study suggests that come January, politicians in both parties will confront a challenging and sometimes contradictory reality about what Americans really think about their government. Although Republicans, and many Democrats, have tried to demonize Washington, they must contend with the fact that most major government programs remain enormously popular, including some that politicians have singled out for stiff criticism.
This ambivalence carries over, notes The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, even into the fraught terrain of earmark spending:
Fifty-seven percent of those polled said they wanted their own Congressman to “fight for more government spending in your congressional district, in order to create jobs” while 39 percent said they preferred their member of Congress to “fight” government spending even if it means fewer jobs in their district. A majority of independents (52 percent) said they preferred their congressman to focus on local spending to create jobs.
Those numbers stand in contrast to the state of the electorate in the fall of 1994 — less than two months before Republicans retook control of Congress with a message built on the public’s distaste for government.
In a September 1994 Post/Kaiser poll 42 percent said they wanted their member of Congress to fight for more government spending in their own district while 53 percent said they wanted their member to fight government spending.
Follow Jesse Zwick on Twitter4 Comments
Pingback posted October 11, 2010 @ 10:01 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by J.P.S., Dan Mitchell and Star, WashIndependent. WashIndependent said: New Poll Says It's Not 1994 http://bit.ly/a4YLAl [...]
Pingback posted October 11, 2010 @ 11:11 am
[...] New Poll Says It's Not 1994 « The Washington Independent [...]
Comment posted October 11, 2010 @ 5:10 pm
At last – maybe some of these idiots currently sitting in Congress (Hear me, Mr. Boehner and Mr. McConnell) will see that by blocking the very programs that Americans want to help them (or gutting and corporatizing the ones that they fake out the Dems into passing) they are not helping this nation. This is not 1994 – two years ago the final nail in the GOP coffin – a failed economy – sent these clowns packing from DC as the leaders of this government. It did so with more than 66 million votes, and it is time for the Democrats to stop acting liked whipped children and start naming names in this campaign cycle, so that we do not end up with the next 12 years being a much worse economic and war cycle than the 12 that ended in 2006 in Congress or the 8 that ended 2008 in the White House.
Americans – at least those old enough to vote – live in a reality that the members of the Congress do not. We see our jobs shipped overseas thanks to the Contract With America of Newt Gingrich fame; our children and spouses sent to war based on lies of the Bush kind; we see our homes foreclosed, both legally and illegally, because of the Bush-Paulsen-Bernanke-Geithner economic policies while our tax dollars are used to pay bankers bonuses for this fraud; and we have seen our education of our children devolved into memorization and ignorance thanks to the No Child Left Behind and shifting of money from public school systems to vouchers for private charter schools, thanks to the GOP and Blue Dog Democrats. We have seen our social safety nets demolished (almost completely now) and they want to take Social Security and privatize it so that the robber barons on Wall Street can bankrupt all of us.
If the American people who vote think that putting the GOP or their Tea Party friends into control of Congress is a good idea for this country, then they had better plan on not foreign wars, but civil war as more and more people go hungry and homeless. This country is not going to be able to survive with a failing infrastructure, high energy costs, high food costs, and no employment. That is what will happen if the GOP takes control again. Americans are depressed and scared, and putting the very people who created this mess back in control is like the battered spouse who lets the batterer back in the home – violence and death follow, usually for the battered spouse. Americans cannot take being battered much longer without this nation dying – we must not allow the GOP and their Tea Party flunkies with corporate backers gain control of this nation again. We will not survive as a free democracy if we do.
Comment posted October 11, 2010 @ 10:50 pm
LOL Devon and his Bush did it to you mantra. Democrats have DOMINATED control of Congress for the past 40 years. Wasn't Bill Clinton President when Newt was Speaker? Haven't Democrats had control of Congress for the past 4 years?
Democrats act like whipped children, because they've failed. Their policies have failed. They threw $ 1 trillion dollars at the recession, and it didn't do a damn thing but raise the deficit.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
