Posted on 10/17/2006 10:30:53 AM PDT by presidio9
Gas prices are down, the stock market is at a record high and 60 percent of Americans say the economy is in good shape. So why are Republicans in so much trouble?
I've been asked this in the past week by several (mostly rich) Democrats and Republicans, so I picked the brains of a number of pollsters. Kathy Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News, pointed to the finding in the CBS News/New York Times poll conducted Oct. 5 to 8, which said that despite the increase in the number of people saying the economy was in good shape, they were not optimistic about the future. Only 19 percent said the economy was getting better, and by a 51 percent to 36 percent margin people picked the Democrats over the Republicans as the party which would ensure a good economy.
Democratic pollster Geoff Garin says "the only economic statistics that matter right now are flat incomes and still more than a majority of voters feel they are falling behind economically. New jobs aren't as good as the jobs we lost and any gains aren't trickling down to the middle class. And voters feel that the economic outlook is glum for the next generation."
In fact, the recent CBS/Times poll found that 46 percent said they were making just enough to get by and another 17 percent said that they weren't making enough to pay their bills. Only a third of Americans said they had more than enough to get by.
Nonpartisan congressional election analyst Charlie Cook reads the polls the same way and says that Iraq and a feeling that the Republicans have been in power too long are dominating the economy as an issue this year, and that many Americans feel they are working harder and harder but not getting ahead.
But what about gas prices? Republican pollster David Winston has long thought they were a big source of Republican woes and if they came down Republicans would have an easier time of it. Cook feels gas prices seem to have "hurt Republicans when they were going up and helped when they were going down," but that the phenomenon was "distinct from a broader economic concern that the Republicans were favoring the other economy that has been doing so well." Democratic pollster Diane Feldman took it a step further. Her research has found that many voters "think the Republicans manipulate gas prices." Both she and Cook say the market is irrelevant to most voters.
In an important book published this fall, "Applebee’s America," the authors, Republican pollster Matthew Dowd, Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik and former AP political writer Ron Fournier, throw cold water on the "Economy Drives the Vote" theory. In a chapter entitled "Values Trump the Economy," they argue that people vote with their hearts not their heads and are hungry for a "gut value connection" with political leaders. Voters are searching for community and authenticity, and leaders who are able to persuade them that they care about voters and convince them that "we are all in this together" will be successful. On a panel in Washington last week, Fournier said that Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm was pulling ahead in the polls despite the terrible economy in her state because she made that connection on values.
"Applebee’s America" is a fascinating book and uses a huge amount of sophisticated polling and marketing techniques to demonstrate the thesis that values and culture beat issues and policies. However, several pollsters have argued that this is a false distinction. Geoff Garin contends that "issues have to be expressed in a language of values – but values without issues lose the transaction people look for in candidates, i.e., how are you going to make my life better."
The Bush administration and Republican candidates are still hoping that the good economic indicators, falling gas prices and issues like taxes and government spending will get through to voters in the final days of the campaign. But time is running out, and so far the voters' heads and hearts have been focusing on other issues and different solutions.
Try this one on.... Democrats roll back tax cuts to top corporations.... A or B happens
A. The greedy Corporation bosses suddenly realize that Democrats are in power and have a change of heart and therefore replace that lost tax income out of their own pension plans.
B. Lay off workers to make up the difference that the tax cuts helped them employ....
If you guessed A you are a Liberal Ass.
Remember everyone, the media is actually biased in favor of the Republicans. At least that's what the Dems are always telling me! If the media was actually neutral, just think how bad it would be for the Republicans!
"Dotty" is a good name for it!
Oh yeah one more thing.... The liberals will blame Bush when the economy goes south because of their policies. Not that it will matter much because he will be leaving office by the time any of their failed policies take effect... But then they will defend their policies to America by saying some such horse crap like this...
In these hard economic times it is importanat that all Americans do their share and suffer by giving up some of our luxuries.... Yea right the Liberal constituancy (The POOR) will suffer needlessly with no jobs, no welfare, but they will get Hillary Health Care so how can they be complaining then....
God America is blind.
I'm amazed that they even admitted that the economic news was good...
LUCKY! I just reached up there for the 2 at a time Netflix, but I'm going back to one....the extra $3 a month is killing me... :)
Young people will say that they don't live as well as their parents did, so something must be wrong, right? The problem is that the young people want to start out their lives with what their parents worked all their adult lives to obtain.
In my daughter's air-conditioned dorm room she had a refrigerator, a microwave oven, a color tv, a dvd player, a cd player and a computer with internet connection. When she was a baby our two-room apartment had a portable radio, a 20+ yr old stove and refrigerator and an electric fan. The biggest thing we had in common is that in her dorm and in our apartment we both shared the bathroom with the people next door. LOL!
Dotty Lynch
Dotty Lynch is a fellow at the JFK School of Government at Harvard teaching a study group of the 2006 Midterm Elections and the Institute of Politics. She is also a consultant to CBS News, where she writes a weekly column, Political Points, for CBSNews.com and does analysis for CBS Radio. In addition, she is on the Advisory Board of CQ Politcs.com.
Dotty Lynch stepped down at the end of 2005 as the Senior Political Editor of CBS News, where she covered politics for twenty years. Lynch began her career in politics and journalism at NBC News in 1968 and joined the polling firm of Cambridge Survey Research in 1972, where she worked on the polling for the Presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter and for many Senate and Gubernatorial campaigns. In 1980 she took a leave of absence to work on the Presidential campaign of Sen. Edward Kennedy. In the 1980s Lynch developed the concept of the gender gap and is one of the major authorities on the topic of women in politics. In 1983 she opened Lynch Research, a political polling firm where she was the first women pollster in a Presidential campaign-the Gary Hart Presidential race and the Mondale Ferraro general election.
The 2004 election marked Lynch's 10th Presidential campaign as a professional journalist and pollster at CBS News, where she covered 5 Presidential campaigns, 10 national Political conventions, 18 Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates, and 5 midterm elections. Lynch was the co-director of the Election and Survey Unit, where she managed a team of researchers to provide information and analysis to all TV broadcasts (CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes, Face the Nation, The Early Show), CBS Radio, and most recently CBS news.com. In 2004 Lynch negotiated the final Democratic Presidential primary debate, the first Presidential debate sponsored by CBS News since 1984.
Lynch worked extensively on political broadcasts with CBS correspondents including Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl, Bob Schieffer, Ed Bradley, Charles Kuralt, Mike Wallace, and Diane Sawyer and interviewed prominent American leaders including Presidents George H.W Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Vice Presidents Al Gore and Dan Quayle, and virtually all Presidential candidates, major Cabinet officials and Congressional and political leaders since 1985. Lynch often appears on C-Span, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer and NPR as well as CBS Radio.
And a little panel she was on earlier this year at The University of Vermont:
Release Date: 04-12-2006
The Media and the Public Trust
Author: Jay P. Goyette
Email: Jay.Goyette@uvm.edu
Phone: 802/656-0726 Fax: (802) 656-3203
The second in an annual series of public events celebrating the life of the late Charlie Ross will feature a panel discussion of prominent figures in the public eye. "The Media and the Public Trust: The Making and Breaking of Political Heroes" will take place Tuesday, April 25, at 4 p.m. in the University of Vermont's Ira Allen Chapel. The event is free and open to the public.
The moderator will be Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Research.
Panelists will include:
• Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, whose run for president in the 2004 national election stands as a signal event in modern presidential campaigns for its innovative use of the Internet in grassroots organizing, and for the role of mainstream media in shaping public perceptions of a candidate's messages and style;
• Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent for Newsweek magazine and contributor of political commentary for national television and radio programs including Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Today Show, Dateline NBC, and Imus in the Morning;
• Ron Kaufman, for the past 25 years an advisor to Republican presidents, governors, members of Congress, and appointed officials beginning in 1978 with the presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush and later as national political director of the Republican National Committee during the presidency of Ronald Reagan;
• Dotty Lynch, former senior political editor of CBS News and currently fellow at the JFK School of Government at Harvard and a consultant to CBS News;
• Howard Wolfson, a former communications director for senators Hilary Clinton and Charles Schumer and currently a partner at The Glover Park Group, communications consultants.
Admission to the event will be on a first-come, first-served basis. No tickets are required. Parking will be available in the Catamount East parking lot behind the Sheraton Hotel, with shuttle service running between the parking lot and Ira Allen Chapel from 3 to 7 p.m.
Speaking of political operatives, did you know that Dotty Lynch is a self-described liberal who worked as a pollster for Democratic candidates and liberal causes from 1972 until 1985? Did you know that in 1984, by her own admission, she was an "ardent feminist?" Did you know that in 1984, by her own admission, she was "very involved" in the successful effort to get a woman, Geraldine Ferraro, on the Democratic ticket? We could run our own story about Lynch headlined, "CBS News-Democratic Party Connection," and we wouldn't have to use a question mark.
http://tinyurl.com/wz2dv
You had a bathroom! LUXURY!! All we had was a pothole in the highway that we shared with every other family that lived in the shoulder lane.
Them's slim pickings.
Dotty - that was your first problem - pollsters know nothing.
That first name says it all!
Why are articles like this even put up here to read? Needs a BARF alert.
Amazing is it not what sort of poll results you get when you poll 50% D/35% R/15% Other
ACK! Okay you win, I'll turn over my violin to you because I sure can't beat that hard luck story!
My 26-year old son just snagged a job with a biology tech company making $115,000 a year, plus bennies. (He is a fairly new graduate of Penn State.)
Sucks, man. Awful. Terrible. Everything is going to the Chinese, dude.
(/sarc)
That's an excellent point. Most people who say they don't live as well as their parents did are probably dealing with completely unrealistic expectations.
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