Tag: polling
Can The Supreme Court's Ratings Sink Lower? They Just Did

Can The Supreme Court's Ratings Sink Lower? They Just Did

The U.S. Supreme Court notched yet another all-time low in its approval rating, this time in a Quinnipiac University poll.

The survey found that a 54 percent majority of Americans disapprove of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job, while just 35% approve.

Registered voters expressed nearly the same level of discontent at 36 percent approval and 55 percent disapproval—the lowest job approval among registered voters in the survey since Quinnipiac began asking the question in 2004.

It's yet another new low for a court that has seen its reputation take an abrupt nosedive ever since it overturned a 50-year precedent on abortion rights this summer.

In June, Gallup found public confidence in the high court had sunk to just 25 percent, a historic all-time low since Gallup began tracking the measure in 1973. Confidence in the court stood at 45 percent in that May '73 survey, taken just months after the high court had established a constitutional right to abortion in its January ruling on Roe v. Wade.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Democrats Rise As Support For Abortion Rights

Democrats Rise As Support For Abortion Rights Hits Record High

A new NBC News poll conducted in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft found support for abortion rights reaching its highest point since 2003, with 60 percent of Americans saying abortion should either always be legal (37 percent) or legal most of the time (23 percent). Meanwhile, 37 percent said abortion should be illegal in most cases or without exception.

Similarly, 63 percent of respondents support maintaining the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, while just 30 percent wanted to see it overturned.

The poll also found Democratic enthusiasm ticking up. The mismatch between enthusiasm among voters on the right and left has become a focus of concern. In the poll, the number of Democrats expressing a high level of interest in the midterms (a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale) jumped 11 points since March to 61 percent.

Republicans' level of interest got a modest 2-point bump to 69 percent in the same period of time.

“How [abortion] plays out in November is to be determined. But for now, it is injecting some much-needed enthusiasm into parts of the Democratic coalition,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates.

News from the survey wasn't all good. President Joe Biden's approval rating registered at just 39 percent and, for the fourth straight time in the poll, people saying the country is on the wrong track topped 70 percent.

"The other times were in 2008 (during the Great Recession) and 2013 (during a government shutdown)," writes NBC.

GOP pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, who conducted this survey with Horwitt, called the number a "flashing red light."

Still, the generic ballot was dead even, with 46 percent of Americans saying Democrats should control Congress while another 46 percent said Republicans should. Republicans held a slight two-point edge on the question in March, a change within the poll's margin of error.

But given the "wrong track" numbers, Horwitt said, “It is remarkable that preference for control of Congress is even overall, and that the gap in interest in the election has narrowed."

Overall, the NBC survey isn’t exactly cause for celebration, but it does suggest a continued shift in the political landscape we have been seeing in other polls.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

As His Numbers Drop, Trump Says Polls Should Be ‘Illegal’

As His Numbers Drop, Trump Says Polls Should Be ‘Illegal’

Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.

 

Trump’s approval ratings have been pathetically low since he took office, and on Monday night, he decided that he would like to just make polls illegal altogether.

Trump spoke at a campaign rally for incumbent South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster in West Columbia Monday night, and ran through his usual mixture of lies and tantrums, while also managing to misidentify the Appalachian Trail as something he called “The Tallahassee Trail.”

At one point, Trump decided to simultaneously brag and complain about his poll numbers.

“We’ve never had higher polls than we have now,” Trump said. “Even Gallup. Even Gallup, who treats me horribly.”

“You know polls are fake news also, you know?” he continued. “What they do, it’s called suppression. They put out these horrible polls, and then they hope that everyone’s going to say ‘Hey, I like Trump, but he’s got no chance of winning.’ Suppression. It should be illegal, actually.”

As it turns out, though, Trump isn’t actually doing all that well in the Gallup poll, where his approval dropped sharply this week, from a pathetic-yet-high-for-Trump 45 percent, back down to 41 percent. Trump’s approval has never exceeded 45 percent in Gallup’s weekly poll.

Trump’s approval ticked up a little when he managed to wring some positive press out of his disastrous summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, but reality quickly set in when Trump returned home and continued to oversee the ripping of children away from their parents.

When combined with the spike in his disapproval rating, which grew by five points this week to 55 percent, the nine-point rating change was the largest weekly drop yet in overall support for Trump.

Unfortunately for Trump, he can’t make public opinion polling illegal, and Americans have not been fooled by his attempts to evade responsibility for the child confiscation crisis he created. Like the free press and due process of law, polls will remain a fact of Trump’s life no matter how desperately he wishes they weren’t.

 

Have You Ever Seen A More Cynical Political Pivot Than Donald Trump Trying To Avoid Electoral Disaster?

Have You Ever Seen A More Cynical Political Pivot Than Donald Trump Trying To Avoid Electoral Disaster?

Published with permission from AlterNet.

If, like me, you think that a President Trump would be (not to coin a phrase) a total disaster, Hillary Clinton’s widening lead in the polls gave you about five minutes to breathe easier, until Trump replaced his campaign chairman with honchos blunt enough to admit that his ugliness was killing him with undecided voters, and pushy enough to make him pretend to almost apologize for it.

Was last week a true turning point for Trump? Did it signal a transformation from the man-baby who won the Republican primaries to someone with the temperament to be president? In the word of the moment, is this the “pivot” that Clinton’s supporters have most feared?

There are more strata of cynicism in the idea of a pivot than layers of pastry in a mille-feuille.

Start with the presumption of two kinds of Americans. Some of them – political insiders, media junkies, savvy citizens – know the score. They’re hard-boiled enough to get that candidates can sometimes lie with impunity; that everything can come down to image and optics; that in an era of post-truth politics, narratives can matter more than facts.

The other Americans are the useful idiots whose gullibility is what pollsters measure. When a candidate pivots from one message in the primaries (e.g., Blacks are scary), to a contradictory message in the general (Blacks are suffering), or when a nominee torques from bullying (smearing a Gold Star mother, say) to sensitivity (I regret causing personal pain), his or her campaign calculates that the base and the undecideds will just roll with it. They’ll bend themselves into pretzels, believe the character swings, dissolve the flip-flops in the solvent of amnesia.

So when insiders speculate whether the Trump pivot has at long last arrived, what they’re really asking is whether Trump has the discipline to maintain the masquerade that he’s changed. If he doesn’t consistently act as though he can get his id under control, too many voters may conclude that the pathological liar and narcissist they saw in the primaries – whom the elite knows is the real Trump – is in fact the real Trump.

The cynicism of the pivot ploy came into sharp focus when Trump, under the tutelage of his new chieftains — Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway —declared in Charlotte, N.C., “Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that.”

If you saw him say that, you couldn’t mistake the meaning of the smirk on his face: “This is an act, people. I’m bluffing.” No wonder the crowd laughed at the preposterousness of it. “And believe it or not,” he continued, “I regret it.” Trump’s signature catchphrase is “believe me,” so when he says “believe it or not,” it’s a tell, a hostage video. “Or not” is the equivalent of blinking “I’m lying” in Morse code. The only disclaimer missing was putting air quotes around “regret.” No wonder his mea quasi culpa was met with even more laughter, and a Trump-Trump-Trump chant from the crowd; it was their way of saying they knew he was faking it.

Last Friday’s Morning Joe on MSNBC epitomized the media response to the Trump shakeup. The question on the table wasn’t whether Trump had truly changed; no one on the panel thought his pivot meant anything truthful about his temperament. Instead, it was all about performance, stagecraft, illusion – whether Trump’s new minders can make him stick to the new script, whether they can market it with a straight face, whether the audience will buy it. Joe Scarborough called Conway’s TV debut as campaign manager “the best pundit performance of the year.” “It was quite a performance,” agreed Andrea Mitchell, because “it didn’t have performance written all about it – it was natural.” Eugene Robinson thought Trump’s attempting a pivot would “if not gladden the hearts of worried Republicans, at least calm their night sweats.” Chris Cillizza wondered if Trump, a billionaire who managed to depict himself as a populist in the primaries, had already “damaged himself so badly, image-wise, that a change like this is not able to be sold to a skeptical electorate.” Brand maven Donnie Deutsch said no, it wouldn’t work, because “people are not stupid.” The press needs to stop setting the bar so low, “to stop giving him presidential points because he can read off a teleprompter and he’s not insulting anybody.”

Within hours of his Charlotte speech, a Clinton ad collected video of Trump being asked if he regretted taking shots at the Khans (“I don’t regret anything”); if he regretted denying that John McCain was a war hero (“I like not to regret anything”); if he regretted calling Mexicans rapists (“No, not at all); if he wanted to apologize for anything (“No, I don’t apologize”). Will it work? Trump’s tears may be crocodile contrition, but fact checking, even via video, sometimes can’t keep a good charlatan down.

Nor, maybe, will Trump’s message discipline stick any longer than after other reboots. Yesterday Conway tweeted that Trump “doesn’t hurl personal insults.” But during today’s Morning Joe, Trump took to Twitter to call Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski “two clowns,” adding that she’s “a neurotic and not very bright mess.” So much for temperament transplants.

A political pivot is a con that wins wolf whistles from people who think they’re too smart to fall for it.  I wonder what it would take to motivate some connoisseurs of that fakery to volunteer a little time on the vice squad cleaning things up.

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks during a Hispanic Small Business Leaders round table meeting at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., August 26, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri