Internal Republican poll confirms Americans think House GOP sucks
Tue Jan 31, 2012 at 11:00 AM PST
I can't imagine why America doesn't like these guys.
Republicans are nothing if not consistent—and it's taking a toll. Politico:
[ politico.com ]
Quote:Long, drawn-out skirmishes over the debt ceiling, the supercommittee and the payroll tax holiday have led to a 64 percent unfavorable rating for [House] Republicans, with their favorable numbers sitting at 29 percent, according to an internal poll conducted by GOP pollster David Winston in the final days of December 2011.
To illustrate how precipitous a drop that is, Republicans started off 2011 with a 43 percent favorable rating and 46 percent unfavorable rating.
A 64 percent unfavorable rating is abominable. House Democrats garnered an unfavorable rating of 57 percent, which isn't exactly bragging material either. In general, the public message appears to be that they are sick and tired of the House, period, which shows some damn fine judgment on their parts.
How do Republicans plan to respond to the not-new revelation that America hates them and thinks they suck? That's unclear. House leadership seems convinced that they need to do better at "talking about jobs," but also doesn't appear to think that might require actually, you know, creating any:
Quote:“We lost our momentum in November and December with the supercommittee and payroll tax fight,” Boehner continued. “… The Keystone pipeline — which is part of our jobs plan — has put us back on offense. This is an opportunity to get back to what we know works.
So it looks like the plan is to go back to "what works," which appears to be doing exactly the same crap as normal, but saying it's "for jobs" and calling it done. I'm not clear on how that's supposed to work out, since all of the worst, most obstructionist polices pursued by the House (tax cuts for "job creators," deficit-hawking to help "jobs," attaching the Keystone pipeline to anything with a pulse and saying it's for "jobs") were always linked to "jobs" in whatever indirect or haphazard ways the GOP could come up with, and that resulted in the aforementioned belief by the general public that the House Republicans, collectively, suck. It's the obstructionism and the lack of ability for the House to perform simple tasks, like the debt ceiling or the payroll tax cut extensions, that has soured people on the House. It's not because the House Republicans haven't been inserting the word "jobs" into as many sentences as they should.
I don't expect there's much that can be hoped for, then. My own suggestion to the House GOP would be to put Eric Cantor in an airtight crate and strap him to the roof of Mitt Romney's car or, short of that, read the riot act to their freshmen members about how no, we cannot destroy the entire U.S. economy just to make you new folks feel good. Given that they will likely do neither of those, it looks like we're in for another year of the exact same behavior, but with a little sticker saying "jobs!" stuck onto the front of every bit of execrable, dead-on-arrival legislation.
dailykos.com
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Polls show toll on House GOP image
By JAKE SHERMAN | 1/30/12 11:21 PM EST
House Republican poll ratings have plunged over the past year, as Washington’s brutal battles have taken a toll on a party that was flying high last January when it took the majority.
Long, drawn-out skirmishes over the debt ceiling, the supercommittee and the payroll tax holiday have led to a 64 percent unfavorable rating for Republicans, with their favorable numbers sitting at 29 percent, according to an internal poll conducted by GOP pollster David Winston in the final days of December 2011.
To illustrate how precipitous a drop that is, Republicans started off 2011 with a 43 percent favorable rating and 46 percent unfavorable rating.
At the same time, President Barack Obama continues to gain ground on congressional Republicans on a central issue: jobs and growing the economy. When asked who is more focused on those two objectives, 49 percent of those polled believe it’s Obama, while 40 percent say it’s Republicans in Congress. It’s the fifth straight month Obama was ahead of Republicans in Congress — Republicans led Obama in early August.
Republicans say the dip in poll numbers is because the party slipped up on its jobs message. Democrats, by contrast, have 38 percent favorable ratings, and 57 percent unfavorable numbers — a slight improvement from November.
The political pain is going to keep on coming for Democrats and Republicans: Obama has said that he’s going to legislatively bypass — and campaign against — Republicans on Capitol Hill. And Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said the 2012 election will be a “referendum on the president’s policies regarding our economy.”
The poll, which was conducted on Dec. 28-29, is the first comprehensive look at where congressional Republicans stand in the eyes of the public. There are a bevy of caveats: Republicans in Congress don’t run against the president but their Democratic opponents. And the poll was taken at the height of discontent with Republicans — and Washington overall.
This poll’s results were the subject of a session during the House Republican retreat earlier this month in Baltimore.
For 2012, Republicans are going to try to rewrite the script.
Gone are the days of legislative warring with Obama: Republicans say they simply want to talk about job creation and present the public with alternatives to the president’s agenda. They’ll be tested on several fronts, including whether the House Republican Conference is willing to go along with a path of nonresistance on the payroll tax cut, which is set to expire at the end of February.
The fact that the poll comes from Winston, a longtime Republican pollster, makes it that much more difficult for the House GOP to ignore. Winston has been around since the heady days of the first Republican revolution and now is a trusted adviser of Boehner’s and works with Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign.
Boehner addressed Winston’s polling at the GOP retreat earlier this month. On the last day of the retreat, he told the closed-door meeting of Republicans that the pollster said “too many Americans right now don’t know we have a plan for jobs. You also heard [Winston] say that just a few months ago, we were making real progress.”
“In September and October, while our presidential candidates were talking about everything but jobs, House Republicans were driving a jobs message — and it broke through,” Boehner told the conference, according to someone present. “We were passing jobs bills on the floor. … And by the end of October, 50 percent of Americans said they knew Republicans had a plan — putting us back at parity with Barack Obama on jobs.
“We lost our momentum in November and December with the supercommittee and payroll tax fight,” Boehner continued. “… The Keystone pipeline — which is part of our jobs plan — has put us back on offense. This is an opportunity to get back to what we know works. … You’ll see me holding up my jobs card, talking about our plan, asking ‘Where are the jobs — ?’ Have you heard me say all that before? Hell, yes. I’ll be doing it again because it works. And it only works if we do it over and over and over again.”
There were some bright spots for Republicans. Seventy-eight percent of those polled believe that the Keystone XL pipeline, which has been stalled by the administration, would create a “significant amount of jobs,” although voters remain essentially split over whether Obama was right to delay its construction. Republicans remain more trusted than Democrats on handling the economy, jobs and energy and gas prices. The poll also shows that the economy is a major issue to voters.
Republicans say their sinking poll numbers are not indicative of a battered party but rather of straying from their jobcentric message. It’s an argument that appears to be borne out by some of the poll’s results.
For example, in early October, 32 percent of those polled by the Winston Group had a favorable opinion of Republicans. That jumped to 40 percent later in the month: Republicans say that’s because of an uptick in jobs rhetoric. When Republicans started battling Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House — and lost their jobs message — the favorable number dropped to 37 in November and 29 percent in December. The poll had a 3.1-percentage-point margin of error.
Along the same lines, Republicans’ unfavorable numbers dipped in October from 59 percent to 53 percent, but rose in November to 57 percent, and in December to 64 percent.
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