Back in May, a lot of us Democratic bloggers took note, and heart, from the first in a series of tracking polls of all 50 Governors’ approval ratings by the polling outfit SurveyUSA.The latest SUSA tracking poll, as Chris Bowers of MyDD quickly noted, shows some significant changes, especially in the states affected directly and indirectly by Hurricane Katrina. Indeed, while Katrina has helped push George W. Bush’s approval ratings to their lowest levels ever, the disaster is helping several GOP governors.With the exception of Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana, virtually every Governor with a significant role in Katrina relief or recovery got a tangible bounce. In the following list, the first number is the governor’s approval/disapproval rating in the September 16-18 SUSA tracking, while the second (in parenthesis) is his ratio in the May poll.Haley Barbour (R-MS) 58/39 (37/55)Bob Riley (R-AL) 58/37 (36/52)Rick Perry (R-TX) 49/45 (38/48)Mike Huckabee (R-AR) 58/38 (51/41)Sonny Perdue (R-GA) 61-34 (47/40)Perdue’s Georgia wasn’t hit directly by Katrina, but did suffer some storm and tornado damage; he got a lot of ink for immediately calling the legislature into a special session to approve a gasoline price gougingbill.One Democratic Governor benefitted from an “Ophelia effect:” NC’s Mike Easley, whose approval ratio improved from 52/34 to 64/30.The “Katrina effect” helps three incumbent Republican Governors up in 2008 who were and may still be in some political peril, Rick Perry, Sonny Perdue and especially Bob Riley. The latter faces a primary challenge from “Ten Commandments” Judge Roy Moore, and a potentially tough general election opponent in Lt. Governor Lucy Baxley. (Riley got some more good news today when his predecessor, Don Siegelman, formally announced he was challenging Baxley for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, ensuring an expensive and possibly divisive primary).Barbour’s boost not only gets him out of the political woods in Mississippi (where he doesn’t face re-election until 2007), but also provides some fuel for the previously laughable boomlet of support for the ol’ rascal to run for president in 2008.All these effects are probably temporary, and all these Republican beneficiaries have lots of other problems. Perdue, for example, is presiding over a significant economic slide in a state that has known little but boomtimes for much of the last two decades. In Alabama, Roy Moore’s supporters are going to back him against Riley come hell or high water. And in both these states GOPers remain vulnerable to slow-developing fallout from the Jack Abramoff/Ralph Reed Indian Casino Shakedown Scandal.Outside the Katrina Region, the SUSA tracking polls don’t show a great deal of movement. Among Democrats, Ed Rendell (PA) and Phil Bredesen (TN) have slipped a bit, but both still look like solid bets for re-election. Mark Warner (VA) now has an approval/disapproval ratio well over two-to-one (66/29), which could help his designated successor, Tim Kaine, this November. Christine Gregoire of Washington has climbed from 34/58 in May to 45/49 in September.And the bottom five Governors are all Republicans: Blunt (MO), Fletcher (KY), Schwarzenegger (CA), Murkowski (AK) and Taft (OH). Ah-nold was already in trouble in May, with a ratio of 40/56; now he’s down to 32/65, in polling done about the time he announced his re-election bid.All in all, it’s a timely reminder that national issues cut differently in the states, and that whatever happens with Congress, there’s an enormously important series of pitched battles going on over governorships across the country.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 3: The Democratic Message on Trump’s Megabill Isn’t Reaching the Voters Who Need to Hear It
After months of watching and writing about Trump’s huge budget reconciliation bill, I wrote my final assessment today…but then saw a poll that made me rethink the whole thing, and wrote that up at New York:
When top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries chose to exploit a loophole in the House rules, which allows party leaders to talk as long as they want, to discuss at record length the baleful effects of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, it initially looked like a bit of a publicity stunt, albeit it a good one. It delayed for hours a very big moment of Republican self-congratulation over the final passage of this enormous package of legislation. It probably screwed up a lot of congressional flight arrangements to get members home for Independence Day. And it likely put a few kinks into plans for Trump’s own festive July 4 signing ceremony, wherein the president will surely praise himself, thank his vassals, and tell more than a few fibs about what his grim masterpiece will do.
But beyond all that, it’s becoming clear that Democrats need to do a much better job articulating their take on this bill and its profoundly reactionary effects on the social safety net. To those of us whose job it is to listen to arguments over 940-page bills as they chug through Congress for months, it may seem like congressional Democrats have been grinding away at the message that Republicans are cutting Medicaid to give a tax cut to billionaires. Some of them held up signs about Medicaid cuts when Trump delivered his belligerent address to a joint session of Congress four months ago. Yet a startling new poll shows the extent to which that messaging — and for that matter, Republican messages hailing the megabill as a people-pleasing growth engine for the U.S. economy that doesn’t touch Medicaid benefits at all — isn’t really breaking through, as Sam Stein reported:
Meanwhile, the kind of people Democrats need to reach but often don’t aren’t hearing much at all:
“73% of 2024 Trump supporters who didn’t vote in 2020 and 56% of Biden-to-Trump flippers have heard nothing about the bill. These shares are 20 points higher than their Harris supporting counterparts — indicating the urgent opportunity if Democrats break out of our own media silos.”
Part of the problem, to be sure, is that Trump’s megabill is incredibly broad and complicated, and the budget reconciliation process by which it was developed, debated, and enacted is insanely complex and obscure. It’s all about as remote from the civics-book understanding of how laws are made as you can get, and it has been understandably difficult for Democrats to describe it compellingly in a sound bite, a protest sign, a TV ad, or indeed, in Jeffries’s eight-hour speech. It was designed that way, and that’s why half the public isn’t absorbing anything about it, and a lot of others are simply processing it via big, vague party-driven narratives.
The bottom line is that the struggle to define this consequential legislation has just begun. For Democrats, finding ways to convey the horror the megabill inspires in those who have studied it closely, and the concrete damage it will do to actual people, must continue right up until the midterm elections. Yes, Trump and his allies will do many other things that might galvanize voters, from his reckless foreign policies to his cruel mass-deportation initiative to the lawless conduct he exemplifies and encourages among his appointees. But nothing is likely to match the megabill in magnitude or in the malignancy of its authors. If voters march to the polls in 2026 or 2028 with no better than a rough idea of what it means, America will get more of the same.