Rasmussen Trust on Issues/ Congressional Ballot-Mid July 2009

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I have noticed some interesting trends on both of these. I figured one month would be an aberration but the GOP leads on 8 of 10 key issues. I can remember when struggle to maintain one key issue.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/trust_on_issues
Issue
Democrats
Republicans
 
Health Care
46%
42%
Economy
41%
46%
Education
41%
38%
Iraq
41%
45%
Nat'l Security
40%
49%
Abortion
39%
46%
Social Security
37%
42%
Taxes
36%
52%  
Immigration
34%
40%
Gov't Ethics
33%
34%
 
The three bolded ones indicate the issues I beleive would most likely indicate a swing towards the GOP in 2010 should the Dems screw up. If you start seeing the GOP lead by 10 points or more on at least 2 of the three consistantly then I think its likely that the Dems are big trouble.

Congressional Ballot
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/generic_congressional_ballot

Date
Dem GOP
 
07-26-09
39%
42%
07-19-09
38%
42%
07-12-09
37%
40%
07-05-09
38%
41%
06-28-09
39%
41%
 
Another interesting fact is that Republicans lead among Independents by a margin of 39% to 19% on the Congressional Ballot. Republicans will have to continue to do well among this group due to the fact that the GOP is now much smaller then it was a few years ago.

Other good barometers include the Governorships in New Jersey and Virginia.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

There is no way that Republicans are trusted more on Social Security after what they tried to do to the system in 2005.  People may have short memories, but not THAT short. 

I agree Rasmussen tends to be off slightly from other polling firms on these things. But they were dead on in 2006 and fairly good in 2008. They also did well in 2004.

As for Social Security the issue as its not addressed people will began to question Dems seriousness about doing anything about its coming insolvency.

I keep wondering why people are so opposed to the privatisation even partially, there is no risk of lossing the money(depends on the account the program uses, if you allow people to invest in low risk accounts like IRA's or even CD's there would be almost zero risk to them at all) and its the only real fix out there. Sure you can raise taxes and cut benefits and that kicks the can down the road and guess what, 20 years later its worse then before. Lets fix it once and for all and get it over with. Technically Socially Security is already invested, in Gov't T-bonds. Which I think puts them at just as much risk as some of the ideas being proposed ways to invest Social security under partial privatization.

If you expect me to take this poll seriously.. then.. yeah...

Your opinion is highly irrelevant considering the level of contempt you hold for those that disagree with you.

If the Dem plan passes to raise marginal tax rates to 47% passes (which it won't),  the GOP will get near to taking control of the House in 2010, with about 10 seats gained due to party switches. There was an interesting piece in the WSJ today, that the Dems control a majority of the hyper wealthy CD districts, and most of those Dem congresspersons are sweating bullets.

There are no permanent alignments, just permanent interests.

A lot of those wealthy districts are also super liberal.  They are represented by safer than safe Democrats like Carolyn Maloney, Pete Stark, and Henry Waxman. 

Yes but some of them like Gerry Connolly, Jim Himes, and other freshmen aren't safer then safe. Connolly is one of the Dem complaining about how the Health Care bill is paid for. He was just on CBS Evening News voicing his concern about it. I would say its a fair statement to they are sweating bullets.

The GOP has a 1% chance of gaining any seats, and a 0% chance of taking control of Congress outright.

Your half right. They have a chance of gaining 5 or 6 seats. Maybe 10 to 15 if the winds really blow hard for them.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Party ID as of August 1st.
Democrats 36.8%
Republican 33.3%
Independent 29.9%

Mostly indies growing at the Expense of the Dems. The GOP seems pretty stagnant in the low 30's while Indies gained a full percent. Other firms tend to show the GOP at 22% and the Dems at 51%. I think that exaggerates the size of the exodus from the GOP and it fails to account for any movement away from the dems because of rising opposition to Obama's programs. My personal view is the Dems probably have a 10 or 12 point advantage after dividing up the Indies which meshes well with Obama's Approvals/Disapprovals which generally have him in the mid 50's.

When they come out in the middle of August I will post the New "10 key Issues" and the new Congressional Ballot numbers, just so I can see another 10 posts full of liberal moaning. .

More August polling
Congressional Ballot
Date
Dem
GOP
 
08-02-09
38%
43%

Time for some more leftist moaning!
 

 

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Well considering that for the month before the election Rasmussen found a party ID of D+7.1 and the exit polls showed a D+7 party ID, I would trust his numbers over the people like CBS and WAPO who just make things up.

I added the last two Congressional Ballot polls of July to my first post in this thread on Page 1 as well because I wanted to continue grouping the polls by month.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

While I agree Rasmussen is typically an outlier, look at this Gallup poll. Scroll down a bit to get to specific issues. More people disapprove of Obama's handling of health care, taxes, and the budget deficit than support. Approve and disapprove are about even for handling the economy.

If you look at the first page Rasmussen's poll from the 15th of July on "10 key issues" shows the same thing with the GOP leading on Taxes, Immigration, NAtional Security, War in Iraq, The Economy, Abortion, Gov't ethics and corruption, and Social Security(I disagree on this one, they probably are behind), dems lead only on Education and on Health Care. Keep in mind this is a generic poll GOP versus Dems while Gallup's is Approve/Disapprove of the way Obama is doing on this, this, and this. So that might explain the difference on Heath Care. I think if you flip Health Care and Social Security in the Rassy poll though it would be spot on.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Democrats will not let Republicans do anything to Social Security, especially if healthcare reform is killed again.  An eye for an eye. 

Ah yes, instead of actually doing something good for Americans they'll all just act like spoiled children.

Republicans are doing the same thing on healthcare.

In what way?

They dont want any reform. 

Not true.

Dems need to quit peddling this canard that we don't want reform at all, We just don't want YOUR reform!!! There are I think four or five Republican proposal currently out there on our side of aisle. We want to encourage competition by allowing for the purchase of insurance accross state lines, we want to reduce cost by encouraging comparison shopping, reducing junk lawsuits, and regulations that reduce competition. We want to create new regulations to further reduce the cartel like relationship between Insurance, Pharma, and doctors. We want to make price and quality info available to everyone so they can shop around. This will get the costs done unlike the House bill and many other Dem proposals. We want to provide to people $4500 refundable tax credit to buy insurance. The Republicans are almost unanimous in there support of this.

Once you have this agreed to you can get something to cover the poor and those with preexisting conditions. That could be a public option at the federal level, or that could be providing subsidies to the states and requiring to them create public plans for the poor and those with Pre-existing conditions, like Massachusetts has done and the federal gov't would cover all or most of the costs so the states wouldn't run into financial problems with them.

There are number of plans on the GOP side. To say we don't have a plan is just a lie being peddled so the Dems can convince the public that its there plan or nothing at all. Well the truth is its there plan versus sanity and common sense. Of course there plan would lose everytime if that was the debate.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Party ID as of August 1st.
Democrats 36.8%
Republican 33.3%
Independent 29.9%


Congressional Ballot
Date
Dem
GOP
 
08-02-09
38%
43%

Time for some more leftist moaning!

Trust on 10 Key Issues
Democrats
Republicans
 
Health Care
41%
44%
 
Economy
40%
46%
 
Education
38%
41%
 
Iraq
42%
42%
 
Nat'l Security
43%
47%
 
Abortion
36%
46%
 
Social Security
39%
43%
 
Taxes
35%
51%
 
Immigration
35%
43%
 
Gov't Ethics
34%
31%
 

Come on and give me that "old familiar cry, piss, and moan".
 

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Party ID as of August 1st.
Democrats 36.8%
Republican 33.3%
Independent 29.9%


Congressional Ballot
Date
Dem
GOP
 
08-02-09
38%
43%

Time for some more leftist moaning!

Being a moderate, rather than a leftist, there is no way I'd trust the Republicans on economic, fiscal and quality of life issues. To take a robust economy that had generated 23 million jobs and a federal government living well within its means and, radically, changing that trajectory through idiologically-driven whims and follies on the part of Bush the Inept, aided and abetted by a servile party in Congress, only to bequeath an economy haemorrhaging jobs at a rate not seen since the recession of 1981/82 is unforgivable. Given that the trajectory was one of a year on year rise in budget surplus, it was clearly foolish to cut taxes at a time of 1) prosperity and 2) war

In the post-Depression era, Democrats have proven themselves to be the ones who have tended to preside over more robust economic growth and job creation; along with a greater rise across the board rise in prosperity, which is why I'm optimistic moving forward. I'll gladly take this president's pragmatic center-left approach over the last eight years of governance with all the finesse of an idiologically-driven cackhanded inept - complete with the end result to vindicate that!

The fact of life is that the Democratic Party is pragmatically center-left; the Republican Party is dogmatically right-wing. Even in Congress, if there is a pragmatic center-right, it's among Democrats - and much to the exasperation of progressives therein lies the checks and balances from within on President Obama (who is, of course, a mainstream pragmatically center-left Democrat). As far as Bush the Inept, to be fair, goes, however, there were no checks and balances from within the GOP, none whatsoever

The Dem party is "pragmatic"? Hardly. Though of course you got the Blue Dogs but most of them are either populist, like yourself or Clintonistas. There aren't any real Conservative Dems anymore except for a few. Lets take a look a some of the "pragmatic decisions" made by Congress since 2007, they held up and basically killed the Columbian Free Trade agreement even though nearly all there objections were taken care and it would have increased our exports more then our inports, and finally at the time Hugo Chavez was getting very belligerent and passing that would have sent one heck of a message of solidarity. The only justification I can see for refusing to pass it was to please big-labor. I wouldn't call that pragmatic, more like dogmatic opposition to free trade. They passed a Pay-go rule and then 6 months later decided to waive it when they decided they weren't willing to cut spending enough to comply with it. Sounds like dogmatic opposition to controlling spending, going against promises they made in 2006. They refused to compromise on allowing Oil and Nat Gas drilling in OCS except for a worthless deal that only opened it up in for states. If they had done that they could have gotten many of there other proposals such as wind, and solar in exchange. Sounds like dogmatic opposition to increased drilling to please the environmentalists. Even now the Dems completely ignored the huge cost savings of Medical Malpractice reform to help pay for there bill b/c that would piss off the Trail lawyers. Yes the modern Democratic party and there congress is very Pragmatic.

The Bush tax cuts were mostly passed in 2001 when the reccession was first starting. Those studies of a budget surplus failed to take into account the recession, and the War on Terror. If you included the money from the supplementals used to pay for the War on Terror, the deficit was too large to blame on the tax cuts alone. Iraq may have been a mistake in hindsight but once we were there we couldn't well abandon the Iraqi people, who had supported us, to genocide and terrorists. The tax cuts in 2003 consisted primarly of slicing the Cap Gains, and Dividends tax which benefitted middle class retirees the most. I don't remember if there was a cut in the Corporate tax or not all I know is that even after that it is still far too high compared to the rest of the world. Cutting taxes for the top income bracket might of been a mistake but taken alone it would not have been enough to save the unrealistic "Clinton" surplus which wasn't entirely Clinton's anyway.

The four years following the 1994 elections saw the most fiscally conservative congress in decades. Earmarks went down, Welfare was reformed, and the growth of overall spending was curbed considerably, allowing the preciously small surplus to appear in the first place, only 60 some billion the first year. I highly doubt that would have occurred under the previous Dem Congress which contained ironically far more Conservative Dems then the current congress. Yes we f**ked up when we allowed Tom Delay to gain influence and with him the growth of the K-street project, the lobbying, the earmarks, the expanding of gov't, and the creation of new entitelments. The wonderful thing is he is gone, and so is Denny Hastert, and so is George Bush, and the House GOP is now being defined by up and comming fiscal hawks like Mike Pence, and Paul Ryan. Pence railed against Bush and his irresponsible policies.

As for letting this economy collapse in on itself, I seem to remember a certain President tried to rain in at least the part of the Housing Bubble the gov't was responsible for by providing more strict regulations for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, A certain Senator blocked him and even went so far as calling the President names for daring to rain these people in. That President was George W. Bush, and that Senator was Chris Dodd(D-CT) who we now know was the top recipient of Banker donations along with John Kerry and OMG Barack Obama. Now granted this would not have prevented the collapse but the problem would not have been so big if they had been rained in. What happened afterwards is that in the following 3 years those two organizations gave out nearly as many loans as they had between the time they were created and 2005.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Party ID as of August 1st.
Democrats 36.8%
Republican 33.3%
Independent 29.9%


Congressional Ballot
Date
Dem
GOP
 
08-09-09
38%
42%
 
08-02-09
38%
43%

Time for some more leftist moaning!

Trust on 10 Key Issues
Democrats
Republicans
 
Health Care
41%
44%
 
Economy
40%
46%
 
Education
38%
41%
 
Iraq
42%
42%
 
Nat'l Security
43%
47%
 
Abortion
36%
46%
 
Social Security
39%
43%
 
Taxes
35%
51%
 
Immigration
35%
43%
 
Gov't Ethics
34%
31%
 

Come on and give me that "old familiar cry, piss, and moan".
 

Bump for the 10 key issues.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

In response to Dave Hawks early post. Three times I have tried to post this and it has exceeded the Character limit. So I am posting it with out the Quotes.

1. You might be willing to support Malpractice reform, but the Dem Congress and Obama aren't cause the Trial Lawyers are one of Obama's special interest groups.

2. Your opposition to Drilling for Oil sounds pretty dogmatic to me. The oil will still be used whether it comes from overseas or comes from the US. If we can drill not only for oil but the Three Trillion cubic Feet of Natural Gas we should to increase the Global Supply and help bring prices down. Conservation will not be enough. Even Dems admit that we should just wait for the wind so to speak. What about the middle class that was being squeezed that Obama and Reid were so concerned about. Are there finances going to wait. But don't get me wrong I beleive the Environment should be protected but I beleive it can be done without an Enron wet Dream of Cap and Trade, $5 a Gallon Gas as a matter of policy as some Environmentalist want, and further destruction of the Middle Class. Why not drill for oil, and then use the Royalties and Tax Revenues generated to fund research projects that will actually do something about Global Warming whether real or not and for Conservative Projects like the Mississippi Delta which would also reduce the damage caused by Hurricanes should they hit the area. But of course Dems oppose the Revenue sharing b/c they don't want to encourage states to lift there ban on Offshore drilling. Dogmatic adherence to a questionable environmental theory is causing you to screw the middle class, oppose the creation of high paying jobs, and deprive states of much needed revenue for Environmental projects.

3. Tax Cutting isn't reckless if you plan to role back enough federal spending to cover the cost. You see technically Tax cuts should not be "paid for" because they pay for the Gov't. The Gov't spends the Money first and then raises the taxes to pay for it. Thats how most insiders view the system two. Conservatives however beleive that you have a certain amount of money to go around and you cover the priorities and when you run out of money you don't spend anymore. Now of course there are and should be exemptions like when there is an economic contraction, economic stimulus is a justifiable expense.

4. Yes we still have a lot of porkers in our party.

5. The GOP doesn't have to be fervent regulators to prevent or resolve an obvious problem. After all didn't Bush sign Sarbanes-Oxley to deal with the Enron and other Corporate Scandals. There were opponents from the Republican party of course but it did get passed and the problems dealt with. The same thing could have been done here. Enact needed regulations necessary to fix the problems but make sure they are reasonable and easily enforced since obviously enforcement of existing regulations was lacking. The GOP doesn't want to overregulate which is easy in these times since we have seen that Regulations can often cause problems. Afterall didn't the first real bad corporate scandal, the Penn Central, occur during the height of regulation and yet what happened there was not illegal eventhough they were hiding debts and concealing losses. No one went to jail for it either. Yet over the next 30 years of de-regulation, those things were made illegal or at least more easily enforceable and when Enron happened people were being sent to jail for it. The De-regulation movement didn't cause this problem. People being asleep at the wheel and certain acivities being given carte blanch like the ratings industry, which graded all that junk AAA, are too blame. It just so happens that I ran into this quote today from non other then the second coming of John Maynard Keynes, Paul Krugman, "The crisis hasn't involved problems with deregulated institutions that took new risks... Instead, it involved risks taken by institutions that were never regulated in the first place."

If you thought I had run away you were dead wrong.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Party ID as of August 1st.
Democrats 36.8%
Republican 33.3%
Independent 29.9%


Congressional Ballot
Date
Dem
GOP

08-30-09
36%
43%
 
08-23-09
38%
43%
 
08-16-09
38%
43%
 
08-09-09
38%
42%
 
08-02-09
38%
43%

Time for some more leftist moaning!

Trust on 10 Key Issues
Democrats
Republicans
 
Health Care
41%
44%
 
Economy
40%
46%
 
Education
38%
41%
 
Iraq
42%
42%
 
Nat'l Security
43%
47%
 
Abortion
36%
46%
 
Social Security
39%
43%
 
Taxes
35%
51%
 
Immigration
35%
43%
 
Gov't Ethics
34%
31%
 

Come on and give me that "old familiar cry, piss, and moan".


 

Bump for the 10 key issues.

Bump for the rest of the Congressional Ballots.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

September Polling

Party ID as of Sept 1st
Democrat 37.3%
Republican 32.6%
Independents 30.2%

Congressional Ballot polls
Date
Dem
GOP
 

09-27-09
40%
42%
 
09-20-09
38%
42%
 
09-13-09
40%
41%

09-06-08
37%
44%
 

Come on my lefties, the patient needs another dose of whinning and moaning.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Party ID as of October 1st
Democrat 37.5%
Republican 32.1%
Independents 30.4%

Date
Dem
GOP
 
10-25-09
38%
42%
 
10-18-09
37%
42%
 
10-11-09
39%
41%
 
10-04-09
39%
43%
 
October 10 key issues.

Issue
Democrats
Republicans
 
Health Care
40%
46%
 
Education
38%
43%
 
Social Security
37%
45%
 
Taxes
35%
50%

Economy
35%
49%
 
Abortion
35%
47%
 
Immigration
33%
40%
 
Nat'l Security
31%
54%
 
Iraq
31%
50%
 
Gov't Ethics
29%
33%
 

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

November Polls

Party ID as of November 2nd
Democrat    37.8%
Republican  31.9%
Independent  30.3%

Congressional Ballot
 Date
Dem
GOP

11-29-09
37%
44%
 
 11-22-09
37%  
44%
 
11-15-09
38%
44%
 
11-08-09
37%
43%
 
11-01-09
38%
42%
 

Issue
Democrats
Republicans
 
Health Care
42%
44%
 
Education
41%
39%
 
Social Security
41%
41%
 
Iraq
38%
45%
 
Abortion
38%
43%
 
Nat'l Security
37%
50%
 
Taxes
36%
47%
 
Economy
36%
48%
 
Immigration
33%
45%
 
Gov't Ethics
31%
34%
 

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

December Polls

Party ID as of December 1st
Democrat       36%
Republican     33.1%
Independent  30.8%

Date
Dem
GOP
 
12-27-09
38%
43%
 
12-20-09
36%
44%
 
12-13-09
37%
44%
 
12-06-09
39%
43%