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Rasmussen...
What They Told Us:
Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Money, money, money. The conservative backlash witnessed in last
November’s elections is now hitting the bottom line.
House Republicans closed the week with a vote to cut $60 billion out of
the current federal budget, and Democrats are screaming bloody murder.
Meanwhile, partisan warfare has erupted in Wisconsin where a new
conservative GOP governor with a sizable state budget deficit wants to
severely restrict the collective bargaining power of public employees.
Other states are expected to follow his lead.
Rasmussen Reports has regularly asked voters for several years to rate
the importance of 10 key issues, and the economy is always number one.
Eighty-three percent (83%) now rate it as a Very Important issue.
Voters also have consistently told us for years that what’s best for
the economy is less government spending and more tax cuts.
Despite President Obama’s insistence that his proposed $3.7 trillion
federal budget for fiscal 2012 includes major spending cuts, most
voters (55%) don’t think the cuts go far enough. A plurality (40%) of
voters don’t think the congressional GOP is cutting enough either.
Still, many voters appear confused because of the ongoing spin game out
of Washington, DC. While the documents the White House includes with
the president’s budget proposal project that government spending will
top $4 trillion in the next two to three years, most voters aren’t
aware of that increase amidst all the talk of spending cuts. Just 39%
think that, according to the president’s budget proposal, government
spending will increase to more than $4 trillion over the next few
years. Twenty-nine percent (29%) think instead that the budget projects
a decrease in spending to less than $3.5 trillion, while 32% are not
sure.
Yet voters clearly don’t have much confidence in their elected leaders
to make the spending cuts necessary to reduce the nation’s
historic-level budget deficit. Seventy percent (70%) think voters are
more willing to make the hard choices needed to reduce federal spending
than elected politicians are.
In fact, if the federal government is looking for places to cut,
Americans offered several suggestions in our surveys just this past
week:
-- Most voters continue to favor repeal of the national health care
law.
-- While they aren’t paying much attention to the president’s plan for
building a high-speed national rail system, voters believe by a 57% to
28% margin that cutting government spending would do more to create
jobs than building a high-speed rail network. Scott Rasmussen explains
more about this in a new video report.
-- Fifty-three percent (53%) of Americans think the government should
stop underwriting Amtrak rail service to the tune of several billion
dollars a year.
-- While many Americans continue to believe there is a need for the
U.S. Postal Service, they’re okay with cutting back home mail delivery
to five days a week.
-- Most voters (57%) continue to believe that government bailouts were
a bad idea, and a plurality (49%) still fears the government will do
too much to try to help the economy. Just over half of Americans think
General Motors and Chrysler may repay their taxpayer bailouts, but that
doesn’t change the negative view of future bailouts.
A sizable number (44%) of Americans remain less likely to buy a GM car
because of the company’s government bailout. One-in-four says
anti-buyout sentiment has kept them or someone they know from buying a
GM vehicle.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is at the heart of the Obama
administration’s decisions about the economy, but only 24% of voters
have at least a somewhat favorable view of Geithner, consistent with
surveys for the past two years. Voters have a less favorable opinion of
Attorney General Eric Holder these days. Twenty-five percent (25%)
regard him favorably, down 10 points from August 2009.
Among Holder’s recent actions that most voters disapprove of is the
Justice Department challenge of Arizona’s effort to crack down on
illegal immigration. Now Arizona has sued the federal government for
failing to enforce immigration laws. Sixty-seven percent (67%) of
voters nationwide – two-out-of-three – think a state should have the
right to enforce immigration laws if it believes the federal government
is not enforcing them.
Only 28% of voters believe the federal government today has the consent
of the governed, a foundational principle of the United States.
Thirty-seven percent (37%) even think a group of people selected at
random from the phone book could do a better job addressing the
nation’s problems than the current Congress, although 41% disagree.
Republicans now hold a six-point lead over Democrats – 45% to 39% - on
the Generic Congressional Ballot.
On Friday, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll
showed that 46% of voters at least somewhat approve of Obama’s
performance, while 52% at least somewhat disapprove.
At week’s end, the Rasmussen Consumer and Investor Indexes were down
from a week ago but only marginally lower than they were at the first
of the year.
The COUNTRY Financial Security Index(R) finds that Americans are
starting the year with a little more confidence: Financial security
sentiments have reached their highest level since April of last year.
This marks the first time Americans have started the year with improved
sentiments since the COUNTRY Index began in 2007.
Read the complete story with links at Rasmussen’s Week in Review
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