Posts By Author » Scott Rasmussen
Boehner’s “Plan B” Doesn’t Help the GOP
21 Dec 2012 
12:02 am
President Obama and congressional Democrats are still winning the messaging battle in the debate over the impending “fiscal cliff.”
Republican House Speaker John Boehner tried to change that with a fallback position extending tax cuts for everyone except those making more than a million dollars a year and letting the scheduled spending cuts go through. As I write this, the vote on Boehner’s “Plan B” has not been taken, but it doesn’t really matter. Either way, Republicans will end up as losers in the court of public opinion.
That’s true even though …
View More...
Health Care Law Is Still Fighting For Its Life
14 Dec 2012 12:02 am
Having survived the Supreme Court and the November elections, President Obama’s health care law now faces an even bigger hurdle: the reality of making it work.
Implementation of any massive new program requires cooperation, something the health care law can’t count on. Overall, just 46 percent of voters nationwide have a favorable opinion of the law, while 49 percent offer a negative view. The reasons are pretty much the same as they’ve been all along. Just 22 percent believe the law will reduce the cost of health care. Forty-eight percent believe …
View More...
Republicans Miss the Point on ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Debate
7 Dec 2012 12:02 am
President Obama is winning the messaging wars in the “fiscal cliff” debate largely because Republicans aren’t even in the game.
The GOP leadership in Washington keeps talking as if the issue is deficit reduction, while the president is talking about fairness.
Consider the numbers. Sixty-one percent of voters want to see a deal reached to avoid the big Jan. 1 tax hikes and across-the-board spending cuts, and 68 percent want the deal to include a combination of both tax hikes and spending cuts. By a 2-to-1 margin, voters would like to see …
View More...
President’s First-term Gamble Will Determine Success of Second Term
30 Nov 2012 12:02 am
One little noticed and quite remarkable aspect of Election 2012 is that Barack Obama won a majority of the popular vote for the second consecutive time. With the exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four-term run in the 1930s and ’40s, it’s the first time the Democrats have won a majority of the presidential vote in back-to-back elections since 1836.
This suggests that the president has a unique opportunity to reshape American politics in a major way. To accomplish that, however, his second term will have to be deemed a success in …
View More...
Respecting Voters Matters More Than Policy
23 Nov 2012 12:02 am
The Republican Party has won a majority of the popular vote just once in the last six elections. That dismal track record followed a party revival in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan led the GOP to three straight popular vote majorities.
To understand what went wrong, it’s important to remember Reagan was an insurgent candidate who defeated the Republican establishment of his era. When Reagan left office, however, the old establishment reasserted control. They consistently nominated candidates for president who opposed Reagan in 1980 and consistently lost elections.
The difference is that …
View More...
Americans Favor a New Approach to War on Drugs
16 Nov 2012 12:02 am
More than 40 years ago, the federal government launched a war on drugs. Over the past decade, the nation has spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting that war, a figure that does not even include the high costs of prosecuting and jailing drug law offenders. It’s hard to put a price on that aspect of the drug war since half of all inmates in federal prison today were busted for drugs.
Despite the enormous expense and growth of the prison population, only 7 percent of American adults now think the …
View More...
Parenting Politicians Is Hard Work
9 Nov 2012 12:02 am
One of the strangest aspects of Election 2012 is that voters are demanding change but didn’t change politicians. They left Republicans in charge of the House, elected an even more Democratic Senate and re-elected President Obama. They’re unhappy with the status quo in the country but left the political status quo in place.
That doesn’t make much sense if you think of campaigns as a choice between competing political issues and ideologies. But campaigns are rarely about such things, and in 2012 a plurality of voters thought both the Obama and …
View More...
An Unpredictable End to a Very Predictable Election
3 Nov 2012 12:02 am
Election 2012 has had few surprises. So it’s somewhat surprising that heading into the final weekend of the election season, we are unable to confidently project who is likely to win the White House. All year long, the economy has been the No. 1 issue of the campaign. That hasn’t changed. While Mitt Romney has a slight advantage when it comes to handling the economy, neither candidate has really convinced voters that they know what the nation needs.
From the beginning of the year to today, the fundamentals suggested the presidential …
View More...
Wisconsin May Be the New Ohio
26 Oct 2012 12:29 am
In Election 2000, Florida was the decisive state in the Electoral College. In 2004, Ohio was the ultimate battleground that put George W. Bush over the top. This year, it might come down to Wisconsin.
That’s a state President Obama won by 14 points four years ago. But Wisconsin has gone through an amazing two years of nonstop campaigning since Gov. Scott Walker was elected in 2010. After he took on the teachers unions, there were efforts to recall several Republican state senators and then Walker himself.
The governor not only survived, …
View More...
As Romney Gains, Senate Remains Challenging for GOP
19 Oct 2012 12:02 am
When 2012 began, the presidential race looked too close to call, but most analysts thought the Republicans had a good chance to win control of the Senate. The numbers were just too daunting for the Democrats. They had too many seats to defend and too many vulnerable incumbents.
Now, 10 months later, the race for the White House remains very close. But as Mitt Romney’s prospects have improved in recent weeks, it is the Democrats who are favored to end up controlling the Senate.
This change happened in a few steps. First, …
View More...
Polls Reflect Voter Reality, Not Pundits’ Preoccupations
12 Oct 2012 12:02 am
According to Political Class pundits, the race for the White House was turned upside down by a single debate. The reality, however, is that a very close race shifted ever so slightly from narrowly favoring President Obama to narrowly favoring Mitt Romney. Either way, it remains too close to call.
The difference is that voters base their decisions on the substantive issues in the world around them. The Political Class is distracted by superficial imagery, an obsession with the game of politics and the sound of their own voices.
While it might …
View More...
Obama May Need a Reagan Comeback
5 Oct 2012 12:05 am
The first presidential debate of 2012 is now behind us. The reviews suggest that many were surprised at how well Mitt Romney did and how weakly President Obama performed.
The Instant Polls conducted by CBS and CNN showed Romney as the big winner. In fact, CNN found that Romney emerged with the largest advantage from any debate since they began the instant debate poll three decades ago.
This leads to two questions. The first is: How much of a difference will it make?
As I noted last week, debates rarely have a major …
View More...
Debates Seldom Change the Dynamic
28 Sep 2012 12:03 am
The presidential debate season is upon us with President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, scheduled to square off Wednesday night in the Political Class version of a cage match.
Heading into the debates, the conventional wisdom suggests that Romney has fallen way behind and has to dramatically change the course of the race in these head-to-head events. Some even suggest that the debates are Romney’s only chance to bring about a change in the race.
If that’s true, Romney’s in trouble. The last time a presidential debate changed the race …
View More...
Romney May Be the End of the Line for the Republican Establishment
21 Sep 2012 12:05 am
Mitt Romney’s comments about 47 percent of Americans being dependent on government and locked in to vote for President Obama highlight a fundamental reality in American politics today: The gap between the American people and the political class is bigger than the gap between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C.
Romney’s remarks are the GOP equivalent of Obama’s notorious comments about small-town Pennsylvania voters bitterly clinging to their guns and religion.
Both Romney and Obama highlighted the condescending attitude that political elites hold of the people they want to rule over. A …
View More...
Let Individuals, Not Politicians, Make Health Care Decisions
14 Sep 2012 12:05 am
The health care debate is a great example of why Americans hate politics.
Both Republicans and Democrats pursue their plans with ideological zeal and reckless disregard for the truth in hopes of winning 51 percent of the vote. Voters hold their nose and choose but would rather have their leaders search for consensus. That would require taking a little bit from the president’s plan, a little bit from the Republicans and a lot from what voters think should be done.
Currently, Republicans are seen as wanting to give more authority to insurance …
View More...
Despite Convention Distractions, It’s Still All About the Economy
7 Sep 2012 12:06 am
Mercifully, the political conventions have ended.
The political press will keep buzzing over whether Clint Eastwood’s unconventional speech helped or hurt Mitt Romney and whether the snafu over Israel and God in the Democratic platform will do any lasting damage to President Obama. Republican reporters will think former President Clinton talked too long, and Democrats will note that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie talked more about himself than about Romney.
But they are missing the point. The campaign is about what’s happening in America, not what the politicians are saying.
At the beginning …
View More...
Conventions Don’t Matter — and Mean Even Less
31 Aug 2012 12:02 am
Political junkies get excited about the Republican and Democratic national conventions, but for many Americans they provide a stark reminder of how out of touch our political system has become. The strange rituals and bad jokes seem oddly out of place in the 21st century, almost as strange as seeing an engineer use a slide rule rather than an iPad to perform some complex calculation.
While partisan activists tune in when their team’s big show is on the air, most unaffiliated voters view the conventions as a waste of time and …
View More...
Romney, Obama Both Struggle to Connect
24 Aug 2012 12:01 am
When Republicans formally nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan next week, the race against President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will be officially underway. Yet while the two teams represent different ideological views, different upbringings, different faith backgrounds and different experiences, neither of them has yet inspired any confidence among voters. Just 32 percent believe the economy will be stronger in a year if Obama is re-elected. Only 36 percent think it will be stronger if Romney wins.
This may be partly due to the length and depth of the …
View More...
Reaction to Ryan: A Gap Between Mainstream America and Official Washington
17 Aug 2012 12:01 am
One of the things Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate ensures is a series of polling questions over the coming months asking voters what’s more important: creating jobs or cutting government spending; helping the economy or cutting deficits; repealing the president’s health care law or focusing on the economy.
These questions reflect the way official Washington views the world, but they don’t make sense in Mainstream America. In Washington, it’s a given that more government spending is needed to help the economy. Most Americans hold the opposite …
View More...
Government Has No Business Dabbling in Business
10 Aug 2012 12:03 am
Just 16 percent of voters nationwide believe it was a good idea for the government to provide Solyndra with loan guarantees. The solar power company went bankrupt and stuck taxpayers with the tab for a half-billion dollars.
The Obama administration generally has responded to questions about the program in the way a venture capital firm would respond to questions about a portfolio loss. They note that similar government investments have turned out just fine and that it’s only fair to look at their portfolio as a whole.
It’s not a bad argument …
View More...
Lois Lerner Sued Christian Coalition In Largest FEC Action in History — And She Lost
Ads
|
