John Kerry and George Bush are tied at 45 percent nation-wide RV’s, with 1 percent for Nader, according to a Pew Research Center Poll conducted 10/15-19. The Poll also found that Kerry leads in “battleground states” 49-43 percent and Bush’s approval rating is 44 percent.
Thanks for signing up!
TDS Strategy Memos
Latest Research from:
tds-wwc-roundtable
Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
-
September 20: Tim Scott Wants to Fire Strikers Like Reagan Did
Reading through the ambiguous to vaguely positive remarks made by Republican pols about the historic auto workers strike, one of them jumped off the page, and I wrote about it at New York:
One of the great anomalies of recent political history has been the disconnect between the Republican Party’s ancient legacy as the champion of corporate America and its current electoral base, which relies heavily on support from white working-class voters. The growing contradiction was first made a major topic of debate in the 2008 manifesto Grand New Party, in which youngish conservative intellectuals Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argued that their party offered little in the way of material inducements (or even supportive rhetoric) to its emerging electoral base. Though Douthat and Salam were by no means fans of Donald Trump, the mogul’s stunningly successful 2016 campaign did follow their basic prescription of pursuing the economic and cultural instincts of white working-class voters at the expense of doctrinaire free-market and limited-government orthodoxy.
So it’s not surprising that Trump and an assortment of other Republicans have expressed varying degrees of sympathy for the unionized autoworkers who just launched a historic industry-wide strike for better wages and working conditions. But there was a conspicuous, even anachronistic exception among nationally prominent GOP politicians: South Carolina senator and presidential candidate Tim Scott. As NBC News reported:
“It’s the latest of several critical comments Scott has made about the autoworkers, even as other GOP presidential candidates steer clear of criticizing them amid a strike at three plants so far …
“’I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike. He said, you strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely.’”
Scott’s frank embrace of old-school union bashing wouldn’t have drawn much notice 40 or 50 years ago. And to be clear, other Republicans aren’t fans of the labor movement: For the most part, MAGA Republicans appeal to the working class via a mix of cultural conservatism, economic and foreign-policy nationalism, nativism, and producerism (i.e., pitting private-sector employers and employees against the financial sector, educational elites, and those dependent on public employment or assistance). One particularly rich lode of ostensibly pro-worker rhetoric has been to treat environmental activism as inimical to the economic growth and specific job opportunities wage earners need.
So unsurprisingly, Republican politicians who want to show some sympathy for the autoworkers have mostly focused on the alleged threat of climate-change regulations generally and electric vehicles specifically to the well-being of UAW members, as Politico reported:
“’This green agenda that is using taxpayer dollars to drive our automotive economy into electric vehicles is understandably causing great anxiety among UAW members,’ [Mike Pence] said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“Other Republicans followed suit, with a National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson calling out Michigan Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin — Democrats’ favored candidate for the state’s open Senate seat — for her Thursday vote allowing state-level limits or bans on gas-powered cars as choosing her ‘party over Michigan.'”
More strikingly, Trump, the 2024 presidential front-runner, is planning to hold an event with Michigan workers at the very moment his GOP rivals are holding their second debate next week, notes the Washington Post:
“While other Republican candidates participate in the Sept. 27 event in California, Trump instead plans to speak to more than 500 autoworkers, plumbers, electricians and pipe-fitters, the adviser said. The group is likely to include workers from the United Auto Workers union that is striking against the Big Three automakers in the country’s Rust Belt. The Trump adviser added that it is unclear whether the former president will visit the strike line.
“Trump’s campaign also created a radio ad, to run on sports- and rock-themed stations in Detroit and Toledo, meant to present him as being on the side of striking autoworkers, the adviser said.”
There’s no evidence Trump has any understanding of, much less sympathy with, the strikers’ actual demands. But in contrast to Scott’s remarks endorsing the dismissal of striking workers, it shows that at least some Republicans are willing (rhetorically, at least) to bite the hand that feeds in the pursuit of votes.
Meanwhile, the mainstream-media types who often treat Scott as some sort of sunny, optimistic, even bipartisan breath of fresh air should pay some attention to his attitude toward workers exercising long-established labor rights he apparently would love to discard. Yes, as a self-styled champion of using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private- and homeschooling at the expense of “government schools,” Scott is constantly attacking teachers unions, just like many Republicans who draw a sharp distinction between public-sector unions (BAD!) and private-sector unions (grudgingly acceptable). But autoworkers are firmly in the private sector. Maybe it’s a South Carolina thing: Scott’s presidential rival and past political ally Nikki Haley (another media favorite with an unmerited reputation as a moderate) famously told corporate investors to stay out of her state if they intended to tolerate unions in their workplaces. For that matter, the South Carolina Republican Party was for years pretty much a wholly owned subsidiary of violently anti-union textile barons. Some old habits die hard.
One of the useful by-products of the current wave of labor activism in this country is that Republicans may be forced to extend their alleged sympathy for workers into support for policies that actually help them and don’t simply reflect cheap reactionary demagoguery aimed at foreigners, immigrants, and people of color. But Scott has flunked the most basic test threshold compatibility with the rights and interests of the working class.
Possibly the most interesting part of this poll is the poll on Party ID (i.e. shoring up your base). Bush’s early advantage in the polls was due largely to his partisan advantage among republicans versus weaker support among Democrats for Kerry. Notice the erosion of support for Bush and break toward to Kerry, especially among Democrats. Clearly due to Kerry standing up for himself and hammering Bush in the debates:
Numbers read Bush/Kerry +/- Bush
poll dates: 9/17-21 9/22-26 10/1-3 10/15-19
Republican 91- 4 90- 3 90-3 89-7 -1
Democrat 8-85 10-81 9-85 7-88 -2
Indep. 40-41 46-38 42-39 43-43 +1
Notice that Democratic support of Kerry has equaled Republican partisanship for Bush (89% Rep. vs. 88% Dem.). If we assume an overall Democratic Party ID advantage on election day similar to 2000, Bush is in bad shape. Notice also independent undecideds breaking +4 (39 to 43) for Kerry to +1 Bush (42-43) since just prior to the debates.
In past elections, the Republicans had higher partisan loyalty than Democrats, but party ID advantage sometimes gave Democrats the victory — if their base turned out (as in 1992 and 1996) but victory to the Republicans if their base turned out in greater numbers (2002).
If partisan loyalty is really equal in this race as this poll indicates, then that is very bad news for Bush indeed, UNLESS you assume that party ID has shifted by about 4 points to the Republicans since 2000 because of 9/11 (as Gallup states to justify their poll weighting). We’ll have to see after the election who’s right.
I don’t know how accurate this poll is overall, but this clearly shows a trend to Kerry and also indicates a very tight race – actually a dead heat. Not at all what is being promoted on CNN & Fox News.
By the way, can anyone figure out what Pew means by a “battleground” state? They say they’re using a new group of them, but I couldn’t find what states they’re talking about.
Ben Ross — thanks for the analysis. I couldn’t figure out why, after having what seemed to me consistent and believable results over the last few months, Pew suddenly diverged from other polls and its own prior results, showing a 7-point lead for Bush. That had me worried more than Gallup and the others, which tend to be all over the place anyway. Your focus on the volatility among the low-income and lower-educated is interesting and probably explanatory.
This is a promising result, although Pew Center polls have yo-yoed around in ways hard to explain. Still, the trend seems at the moment to mostly be pointing in our direction, although it’s so close it’s hard to ascertain what changes are real and which are statistical “noise”.
Andy— There are LOTS of polls, and surely some put Kerry down in the battlegrounds. For example, if the spreads of the latest Zogby internet poll were the spreads on election day, Kerry would be in trouble. Matthews is not a pollster, and seems to pick his polling data in a haphazard manner. Moreover, he uses broad summaries of the numbers to support whatever story he thinks fits as the narrative of the race.
My take is that Kerry is up in the battlegrounds, and the last round of Zogby internet polls were the only datapoints I have seen that contradict this view.
Matthews is a total chameleon. Actually, he is worse than
O’Reilly because he pretends to throw a few more bones to the dems. I can’t believe this guy was employed by Thomas P. O’Neill. Look at his lineup! Andrea Mitchell? I haven’t heard her say a positive thing about Kerry in months. Red Sox win and now Kerry wins!!
The education breakdowns on this poll are extraordinary. The college-educated and some college categories have been quite stable while the high school or less category has fluctuated wildly. The entire change from the last poll is due to high school or less going from 47-37 Bush to 46-41 Kerry. The pattern for income is similar, although less extreme, with the greatest fluctuations in the less than 20,000 category. I suspect that this labile behavior is due to small sample size because of the difficulty of reaching low-income respondents which increases both the sampling error and the estimation error of the weighting coefficients.
Note that since the last poll Kerry improved by 2% among whites and by 1% among non-whites, yet he imrpoved 3% overall. Thus much of Kerry’s improvement is caused by the latest sample containing more non-whites.
It would appear, based on these observations, that in the polls Sept. 22-26 and Oct. 1-3 polls that showed Bush ahead, low-income pro-Kerry voters were underrepresented among the low-education respondents. The Sept. 17-21 and Oct. 15-19 polls that show a strong Kerry lead among voters with less than $20,000 income probably are much closer to the reality throughout the period.
This is striking evidence of the problems caused by the lack (for good practical reasons) of income-weighting of respondents in a year when voting behavior is very income-dependent, and education is not usable as a proxy for income because voters of the same income and different education levels vote very differently. See my posting on the new Wisconsin poll.
Only because the Pew poll gives more detail than other polls can we criticize it in such detail. I suspect that looking at other polls would turn up similar anomalies.
Andy Knox, have you been watching the same Chris Matthews on Hardball as I have?? The bias for Bush is unbelievable!! I gave up on Matthews when he constantly was crowing over how Cheney really got Edwards good, when he said he never met Edwards until the debate. Even after it was shown that Cheney had met Edwards several times, Matthews was still saying Edwards really got kicked by Cheneys’ statement.
I noticed that Bush had been enjoying a significant lead among white Catholics in the previous three Pew Research Center Polls. In the most recent poll the results are almost reversed with Kerry up 7% among white Catholics. Is this just an anomaly? If not, what accounts for the improvement? Was it the last debate?
Can someone please explain to me why these polls all have Kerry in the lead yet when I watch Hardball tonight they are saying Kerry is down in BGround states?
Please don’t say Hardball is a conservatively skewed show, I think Mathews really does a good job of keeping an even hand.
But out of curiosity why is it that many shows list Bush as having these leads yet when I go to Liberal leaning websites they all list Kerry. Which one do I believe?