From repealing Obamacare to Trump’s desire to lower taxes for the rich, Republicans and Trump are in a bubble when it comes go gauging what Americans really want.
Only 36 percent of American voters say Republicans in Congress should try again to repeal and replace Obamacare, the 2010 Affordable Care Act, while 60 percent say the Republicans should “move on.”
Voters disapprove 65 – 29 percent of the way President Donald Trump is handling health care and say 54 – 22 percent that he is handling health care worse than former President Barack Obama. Another 19 percent say he is handling it about the same as President Obama.
American voters are opposed to several proposals supported by President Trump and
Republicans in Congress:
Oppose 75 – 21 percent lowering taxes on the wealthy;
Oppose 64 – 33 percent building a wall on the border with Mexico;
Oppose 66 – 30 percent cutting off federal funding for Planned Parenthood, rising to 85 – 10 percent when respondents are told federal funding for Planned Parenthood does not pay for abortions.
American voters now support 57 – 38 percent allowing Syrian refugees into the U.S., reversing opposition of 51 – 43 percent in a December 23, 2015, Quinnipiac University national poll. Republicans are the only listed group opposed. White men and white voters with no college degree each are tied.
Trump’s Travels
Trump spends too much time at properties owned by his company, voters say 55 – 34 percent. He does not spend enough time at the White House, 50 percent of voters say, while 2 percent say he spends too much time and 38 percent say he spends the right amount of time.
A total of 35 percent of American voters are “very comfortable” or “somewhat comfortable” with the amount spent on security so President Trump and his family can stay in places other than the White House, while 60 percent are “not so comfortable” or “not comfortable at all.”
His numbers are up again, and for good reason! He’s been a great president thus far!
The last time that President Obama’s approval rating in Washington Post-ABC News polling was as high as it is in our new survey was six months after he took office. At 58 percent, Obama’s approval is 15 points higher than it was on the eve of the 2014 elections, where his party got blown out. Hillary Clinton’s hope is that the reversal of opinions on Obama two years later will also lead to a reversal of fortunes for other Democrats — and there’s reason to think that it will.
CHARLOTTE, NC - JULY 05: Democratic presidential candidate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton looks on as U.S. president Barack Obama speaks during a campaign rally with on July 5, 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Hillary Clinton is campaigning with president Obama in North Carolina. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
I know you. You’re a Democrat, or at least someone who believes that Donald Trump is a disaster waiting to happen, and you’ve been very concerned over the past week because the polling seems to indicate that Hillary Clinton’s once safe lead is vanishing with every news release. You also wonder how anyone, and I (you) mean ANYONE, could vote for that Trump guy, and it’s a travesty that he’s even polling in the forties, much less close to Clinton. And you also fear that not only can Trump say anything without being punished in the polls, but that Hillary is losing. LOSING.
With all of this in mind, I have a question for you: Are you daft?
Let’s calm down and look at some reality. First of all, Clinton has a lead in every national poll aggregation since, well, the spring and she continues to lead in the RealClearPolitics average of both national and state polls (sorry, but that CNN poll is an outlier. Like Pluto.). She also is ahead in enough states to have more than the 270 electoral votes in RealClear, FiveThirtyEight, Princeton Election Consortium,electoral-vote.com (where on Sunday Clinton was losing Ohio and Florida, but still winning the election) and..and…and every other reputable polling site in the media ether. Plus, the odds that Hillary Clinton will win the election are above 70% according to most calculations and above 80% in some others. Last week, the Washington Post released polls for each of the 50 states and found that…Hillary is leading in enough states, even Texas and Georgia, to win handily. But that’s clearly not enough for you weak-kneed liberals who must have your 90% win projections and a 400+ electoral vote landslide in the bag before Labor Day.
It’s not going to happen. Hillary is not popular enough and voters are in a foul mood and the country is locked in at about 45% support for each party, with the middle 10% the deciding voters. It’s striking to hear that some Republicans will not vote for Trump, but there are still Bernie voters who won’t vote for Hillary. Plus, it’s still relatively early. Political junkies have been mainlining the politics cut with baking soda for more than a year now. The pure stuff doesn’t arrive until September 26. That’s when most of America will pay serious attention.
Which brings me to the most noxious comment that people make about Donald Trump, that he can say anything and not be punished in the polls. He is being punished in the polls. His numbers are terrible and they continue to be terrible even with the race tightening. If you look, you’ll see that Trump is still polling nationally in the low 40% range. The race is getting closer because Clinton’s numbers are falling a bit because of the email and Clinton Foundation stories. She also essentially took the summer off to raise money and to let Trump say ridiculous things without competing for air time.
Trump’s numbers didn’t budge. His supporters remain who they were during the primaries (and by the by, Hillary is essentially right about them). He’s doing abominably with women, Hispanics, African-Americans, college-educated people and those with middle and upper middle class incomes, and he’s saying nothing that will win them back. To go even further, even with Clinton’s troubles, more voters support her for president than Trump. It’s terrible that this election seems to be a race to the bottom, but Trump is winning that race convincingly.
Starting this week, Hillary Clinton will be more visible and she will begin to actually run for president. She’s clearly the best qualified, and she’s the candidate with the answers that most other Americans agree with on the issues of the day. They don’t agree with mass deportations or banning Muslims from the country or Trump’s view that the country is a cesspool of stagnation, violence and decay run by a president who might still not be a citizen, but is definitely a Muslim. Hillary will make her case and make it forcefully. I also think that the debates will be an eye-opener for Trump because he’s going to be called on every one of his contradictory comments and will be forced to actually take a stand on issues he’s clearly not studied. Hillary will also have some zingers of her own and she’ll show a sense of humor that many voters don’t think she has.
And that’s ultimately why Hillary Clinton will win the election. She’s ahead in the polls now and my take is that she’ll still be leading by this time next week and the week after that. She will use the debates to reintroduce herself, her qualifications, her vision for the country and her steady realism and that will enable her to win.
You do realize that this will be the last week that food stores will be listing summer fruits, vegetables and other items in their sales flyers, right? After Labor Day it will suddenly be soup, oatmeal and cold/flu medicine time even though it’s likely to be near 80 degrees where most of us live. Such are the vagaries of the seasons and the need to sell stuff.
But it also means that the political races will turn for home as people return to work after a vacation, if they can afford it, and politicians return to their capitals for a fleeting moment of relevance before spending full time campaigning. For all the talk about how this year was going to see a different campaign with different rules, it has been a remarkably stable presidential race, and the Senate is coming down to a few important races to see if the Democrats can take control of the chamber. Donald Trump has changed the tenor of the campaign somewhat, but most of what he’s done has not helped him and I can’t see future races taking serious notes from his playbook.
At this point, the polling for the presidential race shows that Hillary Clinton has a solid lead that hasn’t really changed much since the Democratic Convention in July. According to the RealClearPolitics national average, she has a 6 point lead as of today and is ahead in enough states to garner 272 electoral votes if the election was held today. Which it is not. Other state polling sites like electoral-vote.com, the Princeton Election Consortium, and Electionprojection.com show Hillary with a bigger lead.
Most polling shows Trump with about 42% of the national vote, and that has been his ceiling since July. If anything, this is his biggest problem. He will somehow need to expand his appeal significantly if he is to seriously challenge Hillary over the next month, before the first debate on September 26. This will likely be his last chance to help himself since most research says that the first debate is the most important for possibly changing people’s minds.
Of course, this all presupposes that Trump’s potential pivot on immigration doesn’t cause him to lose support from his base, or that something overly consequential is lurking in Clinton’s email server or that we are attacked at home or abroad. Enjoy the last quiet week of August. Next week the real show begins
And he’s still in it! When oh when will he bow out and save whatever is left of the Bush name? I don’t know. Maybe when he falls into the Bobby Jindal zero zone!
Jeb Bush has fallen to eighth place in the race for the 2016 GOP nomination, according to a new national poll released Tuesday.
Bush, once considered a front-runner in the race, was the first choice for President of only 3% of likely Republican voters surveyed in the University of Massachusetts survey, marking the former Florida governor’s worst poll levels since he announced his candidacy earlier this year.
Coming in first in the poll, conducted among 1,224 people from Nov. 5 to Nov. 13, was Donald Trump, who got the support of 31%.
Ben Carson and Ted Cruz came in second and third, with 22% and 13%, respectively.
In a new Washington ABC Poll, President Obama’s approval has risen to an impressive 51%. Impressive, considering the nature of his opposition – people who have no problem making up stuff about him and his policies just to keep his numbers down.
The movement in his ratings — which we would emphasize has not yet been verified in other public polls — has been slight on a month-to-month basis. But his ratings have moved in a positive direction in two consecutive Post-ABC surveys. In May and July, Obama’s ratings were more negative than positive, with 45 percent to 46 percent approving and 50 percent disapproving of his performance. That tipped the other way in September, to 49 percent approval and 46 percent disapproval. And that slight shift has continued in the latest survey.
President Barack Obama faced perhaps the worst job approval numbers of his presidency in a new Quinnipiac poll released Tuesday afternoon.
American voters disapprove of the job he’s doing by a margin of 54 to 39 percent — up from a 49-45 percent disapproval on Oct. 1, according to the same poll. It’s the first time his approval rating has dipped below 40 percent. His lowest score in the ongoing Quinnipiac survey was a 55-41 percent disapproval on Oct. 6, 2011.
“President Obama’s job approval rating has fallen to the level of former President George W. Bush at the same period of his Presidency,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
The president faces net disapproval among men (58-37 percent), independents (63-30 percent), white voters (62-32 percent), senior citizens (59-36 percent) and even women (51-40 percent) and Hispanic voters (47-41 percent). Democrats and black voters continue to strongly approve, 79-14 percent and 75-15 percent, respectively
President Obama’s approval ratings have increased since a trio of controversies involving his administration began dominating the news cycle.
Fifty percent of those surveyed in Gallup’s three-day tracking poll released Wednesday say they approve of the job the president is doing, compared to 43 percent who said they disapprove.
The 7-percentage point positive margin is better than where the president stood in the poll over the two weeks before the IRS and Department of Justice scandals broke, and is near Obama’s rating over the waning days of the 2012 campaign when voters convincingly elected him to a second term in office.
Obama’s Gallup numbers are up three percentage points since the pollster’s May 23-25 survey and suggest Obama’s approval ratings held steady, even as the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups made headlines.
The Michele Bachmann campaign has hit a bump in the road… a rather big bump indeed. A bump so big, that the beleaguered congresswoman may not be able to power her herself over it, and the media is taking note.
Appearing on CNN’s State Of The Union, Bachmann was asked about her disappearing acts in recent polls and debates, and if her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is coming to an end. The candidate saw things differently, denying that her campaign was in any trouble. If fact, listening to Bachmann, you will be lead to believe her campaign is going according to plan;
“I think we are doing a good job getting our message out on job growth and on turning the economy around. That’s what we’re working on.
We’re not focusing on the day-to-day. Because as you have seen with many of the other candidates, candidates go up, candidates go down and what we’re very concerned about is making sure that the message gets out there, because it is not about any one of us, it is about turning the economy around and creating jobs.”
In must be something in the water. The Latest poll released on Monday and conducted by Washington Post/Bloomberg has Bachmann coming in at fifth place. She received a grand total of 4% of respondents wanting her to win.
But have no fear Teaparty fans, everything is under control. Again, Bachmann on State Of The Union:
“We’re just starting a kick-off today of four days here in New Hampshire and we’ve got a wonderful experience in Iowa and we’ve been in South Carolina, Florida, we’ve worked very hard and we have very strong numbers in those states and we’re looking forward to continuing that.”
And at the end of September, Bachmann appeared at the evangelical Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., and likened herself to the “comeback kid.”
“She’s in a position where delusion is presenting itself as the only opportunity, and it exists only in her mind,” said Chris Ingram, a Republican strategist not working for any of the GOP candidates. “Whenever you’re in the position to start referring to yourself as the comeback kid, that’s an acknowledgement that things aren’t going real well.”
Some bleak news on an even more bleak rainy September day. Various polls now show the President’s approval ratings are on a decline. Bad news for the President and the Democrats, as Americans – frustrated with an economy that is intentionally kept in the doldrums by congressional Republicans – blame the incumbent party.
That poll showed the president’s approval ratings skidding to 44%, with even worse marks for his handling of the economy and his overall leadership. An ABC News/Washington Post poll had similar marks, putting the president’s approval rating at 43% while a Politico/George Washington University poll has him at 45%.
The new numbers caused Democratic pollster Peter Hart to conclude, “Obama is no longer the favorite to win reelection.”
With the election still over a year away, the new polls seem to point to Republicans getting their wish to make this President a one term president. President Obama gets another chance to increase his numbers on Thursday when he presents his plan to create jobs. Although Republicans are expected to go against any plan the president provides, conventional wisdom would suggest that the bigger his plan, the more it will be supported by the people.
Republicans will do their best to make sure this support does not happen. Bet on it….
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