Rasmussen What
They Told Us: Reviewing Last
Week’s Key Polls Saturday, December 01, 2012
How
long will this current era of
good feelings last?
President
Obama, like most Election
Day winners in years past, is enjoying a bounce in his job approval
ratings in
the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.
For
the second week in a row, 41%
of Likely U.S. Voters think the country is heading in the right
direction.
That’s up 25 points from a year ago and close to the highest level of
optimism
during the Obama presidency.
Democrats
now lead Republicans by
five points on the Generic Congressional Ballot. This is the third week
in a
row that the Democrats have led on the ballot and ties the largest lead
they
have held since early 2009. Before this recent turnaround, Republicans
had led
on the generic ballot nearly every week for three-and-a-half years.
Prior
to Election Day, voters
trusted Republicans on seven-out-of-10 key issues.
Now, in the first survey following the
election, Democrats are trusted more on nine of the major issues we
regularly
track. Republicans have a very slight 44% to 42% advantage when it
comes to the
economy, but they’ve generally held much bigger leads in recent years.
In
short, the president and his
party have a strong hand politically for now, as Scott Rasmussen
explains in a
new radio update. Still, money talks, as the old saying goes, and,
troubling
for Obama is the pessimism many voters are feeling about the economy.
Just 16%
of all Americans now believe today’s children will be better off than
their
parents, the standard past generations have set as their goal. Only 29%
believe
it is possible for anyone living in America to work hard and get rich.
Just
over half (52%) of Americans
still think buying a home is the best investment a family can make. But
that
compares with 73% who thought a home was a family's best investment in
September 2008 right before the Wall Street meltdown.
Fifty-two
percent (52%) of
consumers think the economy is currently in a recession, a view shared
by 57%
of investors.
Confidence
in Obama’s handling of
the economy has fallen back to pre-Election Day levels. Forty-two
percent (42%)
of all voters now think the president is doing a good or excellent job
handling
economic issues, but just as many (41%) rate his performance in this
area as
poor.
Perhaps
most worrisome for the
president is the fact that while a sizable number of voters believe the
U.S.
health care system is now in good shape, 50% expect it to get worse
over the
next couple years. Most voters have yet to feel the impact of Obama’s
national
health care law, much of which goes into effect in 2014.
“Early
in his first term, Obama bet
his legacy and the future of his party on his national health care
plan,” Scott
Rasmussen writes in his latest weekly newspaper column. “If the health
care law
is successfully implemented and working well in 2016, the president may
have
convinced a majority of Americans that the federal government is the
solution
and not the problem. If the health care law is perceived as a failure,
most
Americans are likely to conclude that Bill Clinton had it right when he
declared that ‘the era of big government is over.’ "
Currently,
there’s a huge partisan
difference of opinion about the federal government. Fifty-nine percent
(59%) of
Democrats have a favorable opinion of it. Eighty-six percent (86%) of
Republicans – and 73% of unaffiliated voters – do not.
Most
voters also favor keeping
government out of the marketplace. Just 24% have a favorable opinion of
socialism. Interestingly, though, while Republicans and unaffiliateds
offer
strongly negative assessments of that economic system, Democrats are
evenly
divided.
Despite
being tarnished in recent
years by the bailouts and the Wall Street meltdown, capitalism earns
much
higher marks from voters across-the-board: 68% view it favorably, 25%
unfavorably. When referred to as the free enterprise system, ratings
are even
higher among all voters: 76% favorable, 14% unfavorable.
But
the first major hurdle the
president and his party have to clear is the pending “fiscal cliff” of
big tax
hikes and deep spending cuts coming on January 1. A bare majority (51%)
of
voters thinks an alternative deficit-cutting deal between Obama and
Congress to
avoid the fiscal cliff is likely, but that includes only 16% who say
it’s Very
Likely. These feelings haven’t changed since just after Election Day.
Any
such deal is likely to include
tax increases on higher-income Americans, but a plurality (48%) of
voters
believes if Congress and the president raise taxes to reduce the
federal
deficit, they are likely to use the money for new government programs
instead.
Voters
continue to like the idea of
across-the-board cuts in federal government spending but are notably
less
enthusiastic if the defense budget is exempted. Significantly,
exempting the
military does not increase Republican support for spending cuts.
Seventy
percent (70%) of GOP voters support across-the-board cuts with or
without the
military included. However, including all spending rather than
exempting the
military dramatically increases support for cuts among Democrats and
unaffiliated voters.
Read
the rest of the article at
Rasmussen
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