It’s rapidly become part of the CW that the president, alarmed by deteriorating support from the Democratic “base,” began a “tilt to the left” in his September 8 “jobs speech.” According to this assumption, he will presumably “tilt back to the center” at some point in order to wage an effective general election campaign.
If, however, Obama has been engaged in some “tilt to the left,” it sure hasn’t been noticed by the voting public.
According to the latest big national poll, from CNN, the president’s “renominate” number among self-identified Democrats is at 72%. A month ago, before the “jobs speech” and its “tilt to the left,” it was at–72%.
Gallup’s weekly tracking poll has the president’s job approval rating staying pretty steady in the low 40s over the last month. During the last full week before the “jobs speech,” it was at 81% among self-identified “liberal Democrats.” This last week the same group gave him a 76% approval rating. Among liberals generally, his approval rating dropped from 71% to 67%. During the same period, his job approval rating among self-identified conservatives went up four points; among conservative Democrats it was up three points.
Now none of these shifts was large enough to signify a lot, but they sure aren’t consistent with pundit claims that Obama conspicuously changed his tune in a “left” direction. Moreover, his standing in the Democratic “base” before the jobs speech was hardly alarming enough to justify a major shift in the first place.
All this reinforces my original feeling that what the president is actually up to strategically is simply a pivot towards his general election strategy of creating contrasts between his “reasonable” and jobs-focused policies and the ideological bender that the GOP has been indulging for much of the last three years. Arguably he is undertaking the pivot too late, and/or with insufficient force, but it does not appear he is just making a leftward feint before settling back in to many months of happy-talk bipartisanship. Barring some unlikely major change of strategy by Republicans, and with the exception of possible emergencies, I suspect we’ll keep hearing more of the rhetoric of “contrast” from the White House as we move towards the general election.

Eric Benson has a New York magazine interview with TDS Co-Editor Stanley B. Greenberg on the topic of Independent voters. On who they are:

…Independents are a hodgepodge; it doesn’t work to look at them as having any common worldview. There are affluent suburban voters who are fiscally conservative and culturally liberal; there are seniors, who are more populist than the population as a whole; and there are a high number of white, blue-collar voters who are deeply angry and have been explosive in election after election. In 2006 and 2008, all these groups voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. In 2010, they voted overwhelmingly for Republicans. Right now, I don’t think we have a clue where they’re going.

On how Dems lost them:

…Seniors were very upset over health-care reform, the squeezing of their pensions, and being forced back into the job market. Non-college white voters saw themselves facing declining incomes and concluded that the economic-recovery effort didn’t have a lot to do with them. Suburban voters–who had reacted against the Evangelical, Bush Republican Party–became much more focused on fiscal matters than cultural matters. All of them moved against the Democrats probably a good year before the 2010 election.

On Obama’s chances with Independent voters:

Non-college whites are very populist. And older, non-college-graduate seniors are more populist than any segment of the electorate. They’re nationalist, they’re anti-immigration, and more than that they’re anti-Wall Street. What the president has done with his new proposals is exactly the kind of thing these voters might respond to. The idea that millionaires and hedge-fund managers ought to be paying their fair share is music to their ears.

The interview also touches on Greenberg’s views on the myth of Independents being centrists, the likelihood of a third party candidate getting their votes in 2012 and the fact that they are often “less engaged and informed,” among other topics. Benson’s interview elicits an interesting perspective from a top political strategist.

Gerald F. Seib’s “Blue-State Math Is Boon to Obama, Target for GOP” in today’s Wall St. Journal discusses the President’s Electoral College edge: “Specifically, there are 18 states plus the District of Columbia that have voted Democratic in all five presidential elections since 1992. Combined, they carry 242 electoral votes–90% of the votes needed for victory.” Seib also notes Obama’s trouble spots, most notably Ohio, “the juiciest target for Republicans.”
Media Matters for America reports on the Fox News week-long attack on government regulation, ordered by Roger Ailes. Elsewhere, ProPublica’s Marian Wang debunks the myth that government regulation is a job-killer.
In The Nation, John Nichols reviews the arguments for primary challenges to President Obama, noting Ralph Nader’s foray as an activist working inside the Democratic Party to change it. Although many progressives hold Nader’s hard-headed political analysis in high regard, CNN Opinion’s Donna Brazile makes a strong case that the net result of his campaigns thus far has been of great benefit to Republicans.
Lew Daly’s post “The Church of Labor” at Democracy addresses a provocative notion — that “collective bargaining is, ultimately, a victim not just of America’s right-leaning politics and market liberalism, but of America’s pervasive institutional and legal secularism–our so-called “wall of separation” between church and state.”
Republicans favorite tax stat these days is the one about the top 1 percent of all earners paying 40 percent of the taxes, usually followed by the question “isn’t that enough?” Robert Frank has a smart answer to the question in his Wall St. Journal article “Why the Rich Pay 40% of Taxes“: “…the top 1% share of income grew nearly five times faster than their share of taxes..”
On October 1, the CalTech-MIT Voting Technology Project will hold a major panel discussion on “Election Integrity — Past, Present and Future” at M.I.T.’s Kirsh Auditorium in Cambridge, MA. According to the Keene Sentinel, “The event will host a wide range of panelists from academia, systems and elections offices, and will have a relevance to all Americans with an interest in voting integrity where machines are involved — meaning practically everybody.” Indeed.
NPR’as Pam Fessler’s on line story “Voters May Face Slower Lines In 2012 Elections” suggests that there is more than a little to worry about regarding voting machines: “One of the big concerns is the impact budget cuts will have on voting machines. Most places bought new electronic equipment after the 2000 elections. But Charles Stewart, an election expert at MIT, says this new equipment is much more costly to maintain than the old punch-card and lever machines…”I don’t think many people, myself included, really recognized back a decade ago that this computerized equipment has a relatively short lifespan,” he says…”The worry, of course, is that either machines will fail, causing localities to have to kind of double up or to borrow machines, or not have enough on Election Day…”
In “Analysis: Democrats Hit Reset on Health Care,” Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the Associated Press writes that Dems are betting a lot on the GOP’s recent fumbles on Medicare. He quotes Democratic pollster Celinda Lake: “This is not a theoretical issue, it is a place where Republicans have taken votes that are very unpopular…It would be foolish of Democrats to waffle on this issue…Cutting Medicare is a much more dicey proposition in the general election. Medicare is popular even among the people who think it’s in trouble.”
Emily Ekins of the libertarian magazine Reason addresses the question “Is Half the Tea Party Libertarian?“, analyzing Reason-Rupe polling data indicating that the tea party is divided between social conservatives and “libertarian-leaners.” The data indicates that the tea partiers are fairly unified on economic questions, but some tea partiers may balk at voting for social conservatives.
Republicans are making a lot of noise about jobs, ‘job-killers’ and job-creation. But James Surowiecki argues in his “Jobs and the GOP” post in the New Yorker that Republican office-holders tend to get more of a free ride on jobs from voters – as a result of low voter expectations. The opposite holds true for Democratic political leaders and Democratic voters.
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham has never provided a voice of sanity on foreign policy in his party. Having advocated military conflict with Iran, he now urges escalating U.S. military confrontation with Pakistan, despite their nuclear weapons, standing army of more than 600K and 500K in reserves. Juan Cole has the takedown here.
Maria Cardona’s “No Casa Blanca for the GOP” at HuffPo may be the definitive dismissal of Republican hopes for winning the Latino vote in 2012.

Michael Tomasky’s “Obama Plays to the Base” in The Daily Beast mulls over the Administration’s strategy and offers an alternative:

…The Obama people feel that amping up the base is their best play. And yet, many will counter, won’t this strategy perforce alienate still more independents? If he spends the year playing identity politics with blacks and Latinos and Jews, he’ll kill himself with those in the middle. Filling in the picture a bit more, Bill Galston posted an ominous piece at The New Republic looking at some Pew polling that shows that “average voters” think of themselves as twice as far from the Democratic Party as they are from the Republican Party. They said the precise opposite in 2005, heading into two elections in which independents gave Democrats majority support.
So how can Obama serve both masters, base and swing? It’s the age-old question, and there aren’t any easy answers…

Tomasky urges Dems to take a closer look at common ground shared by the base and Indies:

…But I do think Democrats often make a terrible mistake in thinking that base Democrats and independents have completely opposing interests. Democrats tend to think of independents as Republicans Lite. This is true on some issues. Independents like deficit reduction, for example–well, that is, they actually like real deficit reduction, not the phony Republican view of deficit reduction, which backs reducing the deficit as long as the cuts kick poor people in the behind one more time and tell rich ones they’re safe.
But independents aren’t that monolithic. Of the 35 or so percent of voters who call themselves independent, according to Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux of Peter Hart Research Associates, about two thirds are basically Democrats or Republicans who just prefer calling themselves independent but whose votes are pretty reliable. That leaves maybe 10 to 15 percent of the electorate that is truly independent–still a big chunk, for sure, and a crucial or perhaps the crucial key to winning most elections. There are two things about these voters, Molyneux says.
First, they take some conservative positions and some progressive ones. Some recent polling data from the Kaiser Family Foundation confirm this. You can see from it that while independents as a group are astonishingly right down the middle between Democrats and Republicans on a number of questions, there are a few on which they’re closer to Democrats, like protecting Social Security and being open to some defense cuts. But there’s something else important to them. “They also want someone who can run things, a person who can make things work,” Molyneux says.
This is what Democrats misunderstand about independent voters. Obama and his people seemed to think that over the summer, independents wanted them to cut a deal with the GOP on the debt ceiling. He’d look moderate, reasonable. So they cut it. Result: they lost about 8 points among independents, who hated the deal because it symbolized dysfunction and because the president looked weak.
Republicans as a rule don’t pander to independents in so slavish a way. Rather than trying to cater to independents’ presumed ideological preferences, Republicans try to say things that will resonate with independents’ emotional posture. Remember Bush in 2004. What did he say to woo independents? “You might not always agree with me, but you know where I stand.” It was a line that traded exactly on this quality independents look for that Molyneux describes. And it worked well enough–the guy won. What Democrats say to independents is precisely the opposite. Democrats say, “You might not know where I stand, but I’m always trying to look like I agree with you!” It’s kind of pathetic. And it’s the same old Democratic error of trying to win people over intellectually rather than emotionally.

Tomasky sees a winning strategy Obama can play:

There is, then, a way for Obama to inspire both the base and swing voters, and it’s absurdly simple: he needs to accentuate the items on which the two groups more or less agree and fight hard for them. I’d call it a radical stylistic posture on behalf of an ideologically modest agenda. There’s something in that for both camps–base and swing–to latch onto. To do that, Obama and his people merely have to start thinking more about the similarities between Democrats and independents than about their differences.

it makes sense. Instead of going crazy trying to figure out what Independents, who are not ideologically monolithic, believe, appeal to the values many of them share with Democrats and emphasize the policies that reflect them as strongly as possible in messaging. There’s no real downside, and it just might make the difference in a close election.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
If you don’t think ideological perceptions matter in American politics, you need read no further. If you do and you’re a Democrat, there’s something to worry about. Even as the terms of the political debate in Washington, in the eyes of many Democrats, have moved steadily to the right, the electorate is increasingly likely to see itself as ideologically closer to the Republican Party than to Democrats. Unless Obama and Democrats can find a solution to this riddle–and find one fast–they will be contesting the 2012 election on forbidding terrain.
In mid-2005, as disaffection with the Bush administration and the Republican Party was gathering momentum, the Pew Research Center asked American to place themselves and the political parties on a standard left-right ideological continuum. At that time, average voters saw themselves as just right of center and equidistant from the two political parties. Independents considered themselves twice as far away from the Republican Party as from the Democrats, presaging their sharp shift toward the Democrats in the 2006 mid-term election.
In August of this year, Pew posed a very similar question (note to survey wonks: Pew used a five-point scale, versus six in 2005), but the results were very different. Although average voters continue to see themselves as just right of center, they now place themselves twice as far away from the Democratic Party as from the Republicans. In addition, Independents now see themselves as significantly closer to the Republican Party, reversing their perceptions of six years ago.
There’s another difference as well. In 2005, Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of their own parties dovetailed with the perceptions of the electorate as a whole. Today, while voters as a whole agree with Republicans’ evaluation of their party as conservative, they disagree with Democrats, who on average see their party as moderate rather than liberal. So when Independents, who see themselves as modestly right of center, say that Democrats are too liberal, average Democrats can’t imagine what they’re talking about.
Compounding the problem, the American people are gradually polarizing. According to Gallup, twenty years ago, as Bill Clinton began his presidential campaign, self-described moderates formed the plurality of the electorate–43 percent; conservatives were 36 percent, liberals 17 percent. By the summer of 2011, the conservative share had risen to 41 percent and liberals to 21 percent, while moderates declined to 36 percent, surrendering their plurality status to conservatives. Because nearly all conservatives now vote for Republicans and liberals for Democrats, the share of the shrinking pool of moderates that Democrats need to build a majority is now larger than ever.
Another Gallup finding that should alert Democrats is the ongoing collapse of public confidence in government. A survey released earlier this week found that Americans now believe that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends, the highest estimate ever recorded. Twenty-five years ago, that figure stood at only 38 cents. While estimates of waste at the state and local level remain lower than for the federal level, they have also risen by double digits in recent decades.
Overall, it’s hard to avoid concluding that the ideological playing-field heading into 2012 is tilted against Democrats. This reality only deepens the strategic dilemma the White House now confronts. The conventional strategy for an incumbent is to secure the base before the general public gets fully engaged and then reach out to the swing voters whose decisions spell the difference between victory and defeat. By contrast, the Obama team spent most of 2011 in what turned out to be a failed effort to win over the Independent voters who deserted Democrats in droves last November, in the process alienating substantial portions of the base. To rekindle the allegiance and enthusiasm of core supporters, the president now finds himself having to draw sharp ideological lines, risking further erosion among Independents and even moderate Democrats. Tellingly, a number of at-risk Democratic senators up for reelection in 2012 have already refused to go along with key elements of the president’s recent proposals.
Granted, ideology isn’t everything. Political scientists have long observed that Americans are more liberal on particulars than they are in general–ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. (Surveys have shown majority support for most individual elements of the president’s jobs and budget packages.) And the Republicans could undermine their chances by nominating a presidential candidate who is simply too hard-edged conservative for moderates and Independents to stomach.
In the face of widespread skepticism and disillusion, it will be an uphill battle for Democrats to persuade key voting blocks that government can really make their lives better. But if they fail, the public will continue to equate public spending with waste, the anti-government message will continue to resonate, and Democrats will be in dire straits when heading into what is shaping up as a pivotal election.

Our 9/20 staff post commented on one of the unintended, beneficial effects of the Citizens United ruling – an affirmation of transparency in financial disclosure of political donations. In his “A Campaign Finance Ruling Turned to Labor’s Advantage” in today’s new York Times, Steven Greenhouse reports on yet another possible upside for Democrats:

Labor unions had initially assailed the ruling, known as Citizens United, for allowing corporations and wealthy donors to vastly expand their spending on campaigns. That has indeed happened, with the proliferation of a new generation of political action committees, known as Super PACs, that can accept unlimited donations.
But the ruling also changed the rules for unions, effectively ending a prohibition on outreach to nonunion households. Now, unions can use their formidable numbers to reach out to sympathetic nonunion voters by knocking on doors, calling them at home and trying to get them to polling places. They can also create their own Super PACs to underwrite bigger voter identification and get-out-the-vote operations than ever before.
…Before the Citizens United ruling, unions were banned from using dues money to reach out to nonmembers in political campaigns, but now unions plan to campaign among the 89 percent of Americans who do not belong to unions. Union officials have long complained that when their foot soldiers knocked on doors in, say, Milwaukee or Columbus, Ohio, they wasted huge amounts of time because they could visit only union members’ homes and often had to skip 90 percent of the houses. Now they can knock on every door on a block.

Instead of funding Democrats in general, the federation is expected to cherry-pick pro-union political candidates, including the occasional Republican. The hope is that this will encourage Democrats to more ardently embrace pro-union policies.
In 2008 unions spent about $200 million to support Democratic candidates. But labor leaders were disappointed in the failure of many Democratic members of congress to support union priorities like the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Greenhouse adds that the federation is expected to set up a ‘super PAC’ that will function year-round, as opposed to only during campaigns. He quotes AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka: “Now we’re going to have a full-time campaign, and that campaign will be able to move, hopefully, from electoral politics to issue advocacy and accountability.”
There is the danger that the decline in union funding for Democratic candidates could lead to a GOP sweep — and and even stronger Republican assault on collective bargaining rights. But it is also possible that the new union policy could encourage Dems to step up and support unions, which may already be reflected in the President’s American Jobs Act, as Trumka suggests.
Greenhouse reports that the politically-active Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has seized the opportunity presented by the Citizens United ruling, sending “thousands of members to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors in blue-collar neighborhoods in Cleveland, Milwaukee and a dozen other cities, aiming to educate and mobilize union and nonunion workers on economic issues.” The union also mobilized a sit-in at the office of GOP Representative Paul D. Ryan to protest his proposals to gut Medicare.
Labor leaders are aware that the Citizens United Ruling is far more beneficial to corporations, with their much deeper pockets. But at least unions are using the ruling to optimize their strategy.

Michael Kazin, author of “American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.” has an interesting article in the Sunday New York Times, “Whatever Happened to the American Left?,” which includes insightful observations on how progressives might become more assertive in the Democratic Party. Kazin notes the long evolution of progressive activism into a potent force:

How do we account for the relative silence of the left? Perhaps what really matters about a movement’s strength is the years of building that came before it. In the 1930s, the growth of unions and the popularity of demands to share the wealth and establish “industrial democracy” were not simply responses to the economic debacle. In fact, unions bloomed only in the middle of the decade, when a modest recovery was under way. The liberal triumph of the 1930s was in fact rooted in decades of eloquent oratory and patient organizing by a variety of reformers and radicals against the evils of “monopoly” and “big money.”

Looking towards the future, Kazin says the left “will have to figure out how to redefine the old ideal of economic justice for the age of the Internet and relentless geographic mobility.” He envisions a strong role for social activism that doesn’t depend on politicians:

… The left must realize that when progressives achieved success in the past, whether at organizing unions or fighting for equal rights, they seldom bet their future on politicians. They fashioned their own institutions — unions, women’s groups, community and immigrant centers and a witty, anti-authoritarian press — in which they spoke up for themselves and for the interests of wage-earning Americans.
Today, such institutions are either absent or reeling. With unions embattled and on the decline, working people of all races lack a sturdy vehicle to articulate and fight for the vision of a more egalitarian society. Liberal universities, Web sites and non-governmental organizations cater mostly to a professional middle class and are more skillful at promoting social causes like legalizing same-sex marriage and protecting the environment than demanding millions of new jobs that pay a living wage.

As Kazin concludes: “A reconnection with ordinary Americans is vital not just to defeating conservatives in 2012 and in elections to come. Without it, the left will remain unable to state clearly and passionately what a better country would look like and what it will take to get there.”

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the war of words over Barack Obama’s presidency, one important asset for conservatives has been the ability to identify at least a few self-styled “centrists” to periodically support the standard Republican claim that Obama is a dangerous leftist who is recklessly expanding the federal government beyond any past precedent or reasonable expectation. Unsurprisingly, after the president’s recent jobs speech and his deficit reduction proposal, we are at a moment when conservatives are eagerly harvesting expressions of “centrist” dismay to complement claims that Obama has lurched dangerously to the left by promoting new fiscal stimulus measures and reviving demands for a partial rollback of Bush-era tax cuts for the very wealthy.
The GOP has found more than a few willing exemplars. David Brooks, that pillar of reasonable moderation who last made news deploring the radicalism of today’s conservative movement, has now returned to the GOP fold, anguished as he is that Obama has abandoned the “centrist Clinton approach” in favor of a Ted Kennedy-style liberalism. Nicely reinforcing this meme, Clinton family pollster and strategist Mark Penn has set off shock waves in the commentariat in accusing Obama of un-Clintonian “class warfare” by virtue of his championship of upper-income tax rates close to those that prevailed during the actual Clinton administration (which both Obama and Hillary Clinton pledged to restore in 2008). Mainstream journalist Ken Walsh of U.S. News closed the desired feedback loop by citing Penn, oil-and-gas industry serf Mary Landrieu, and her desperate red-state colleague Ben Nelson as representing a “centrist Democrat” revolt against Obama’s lurch to the left. It’s pretty meager evidence, to be sure, but it’s all bankable intellectual capital for a Republican Party trying to disguise its own militant conservative ideological trend as a modest reaction to Democratic overreach.
But the ongoing conservative effort to “seize the political center”–not by occupying it with any centrist policy positions or willingness to compromise, but simply by asserting that Obama is the true radical–is being complicated by a parallel development: the insistence of hard-core Tea Party conservatives that the GOP object to every progressive policy initiative since the early days of the New Deal.
From the very beginning of the Obama presidency, there has been a barely acknowledged tension between these two conservative approaches to defining the enemy. According to one narrative, the fine, honorable old Democratic Party has been captured by quasi-Marxist America-haters led by the bicoastal misfits Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, and the Saul Alinskly/ William Ayers disciple in the White House. Certainly, this sort of argument has a fine pedigree in conservative circles, dating back at least to Ronald Reagan, who often described himself as a New Deal Democrat whose party left him behind when it lurched to the far left. And this funhouse mirror view of a Democratic Party gone suddenly and terribly wrong is made especially vivid any time a Clintonista like Mark Penn can be recruited to make the case that Obama is something new and frightening in American politics.
But the competing Tea Party/”constitutional conservative” view is that Obama is no better or worse than the socialist scoundrels who preceded him, and that the GOP must offer not just some return to the policies of a few years ago or even a few decades ago, but to a prelapsarian golden age when “job creators” walked tall and free and Washington minded its own, very limited business.
This more radical conservative vision has been embraced at one time or another by three of the four remaining viable Republican candidates for president–Perry, Bachmann, and Paul. It offers the White House a big, fat target in its frantic efforts to make this a comparative campaign rather than a referendum on the status quo. But aside from helping the incumbent define his challengers in an invidious way, it also affects the GOP’s ability to define Obama as a departure from familiar political norms. How many centrist validators like David Brooks will Rick Perry be able to attract if he can’t bring himself to repudiate the clear view expressed in Fed Up! that the abominations of the Obama administration are just another step down the road to serfdom first plotted by FDR? How many Clintonistas like Penn and Doug Schoen or Fox Democrats like Pat Caddell will be able to bring themselves to stop attacking today’s Democratic Party as an aberration from its proud past, and start attacking their own heritage and their own former bosses? Can Ed Koch, one of the heroes of the Republican victory in the recent special congressional election in New York, really keep asking the children of the New Deal to “send Obama a message” if it means saying Hoover was right and FDR was wrong? How, in short, how can Republicans seize the center if they treat the last 75 years of bipartisan policies as a monstrous perversion of American ideals?
Conservatives had better enjoy this period of supreme strategic flexibility, when they can simultaneously benefit from expressions of centrist dismay over Obama’s supposed hyper-liberalism while firing up the base with lurid fantasies of a return to the nineteenth century. For the sake of message discipline, they will eventually need to choose a clear and consistent image of Obama, and of themselves, and a presidential candidate who can convincingly convey both.

The following executive summary with key findings of a new report by Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Siefert of Democracy Corps, is cross posted from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research:
The latest Democracy Corps survey of the Republican House battleground seats confirms that 2012 will be an explosive year. These Republicans swept into Washington on the tide of a change wave but are now facing what could be a change election with an even higher wave, and these seats are anything but secure. The difference from the last three elections is that this wave seems to be threatening everything in its path.
This is obviously not the best moment to judge the Democrats’ eventual fortunes–with fewer voters identifying as Democrats, with Democrats themselves less enthusiastic about the president, and with his overall approval rating down 7 points and losing independents in these districts. We do not yet know the public’s reaction to the president’s latest initiatives, but there is reason to believe they can help him and the Democrats here.
Whatever else is happening on the Democratic side, the bigger story is the growing vulnerability of the incumbent House Republicans. The mood of the country is deeply pessimistic and voter anger encompasses the Republicans as well, particularly the new House members. This survey in these mostly Obama-2008 districts does not ask generic questions but asks about the incumbent members by name. Consider the following:
Key Findings

Negative personal feelings about the incumbent members have jumped 10 points since March; disapproval of how he or she is handling the job has jumped 7 points.
The percent saying they “can’t re-elect” is up 4 points to 49 percent – compared to just 40 percent who say they “will re-elect because the incumbent is doing a good job and addressing issues important to voters.” This is substantially worse than the position of Democratic incumbents two years ago.
Among independents, disapproval of incumbent Republican House members jumped 12 points, and a large majority of independents (54 to 37 percent) say they “can’t vote to re-elect” the incumbent.
There has been a 9-point rise in the number saying the incumbent will not work with both parties to get things done; a 6-point rise in the number saying their representative does not fight for people in the district.
While the incumbent Republicans are at 50 percent in the named ballot, a slight improvement since March, the gains were produced almost entirely by consolidation of Republicans. They did not improve their vote position with independents.
Attacks on the Republicans in this balanced survey have a dramatic impact on the position of these incumbents. After the attacks and messages–with Medicare figuring centrally–the race for Congress is dead even at 45 to 45 percent. One in ten voters shifts away from these vulnerable incumbents.
“These Republicans swept into Washington on the tide of a change wave but are now facing what could be a change election with an even higher wave, and these seats are anything but secure. The difference from the last three elections is that this wave seems to be threatening everything in its path.”