Poll: More Now Think Obama Is “Partisan Dem” — And His Approval Rating Is Up!
Not that you needed it, but here’s yet another possible sign that the public doesn’t tend to want our politicians to engage in “bipartisanship” for its own sake.
A new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that 50% now think President Obama is “governing as a partisan Democrat,” up seven points from last month and up 11 points from two months ago.
So has that shift hurt his approval rating? Nope. If anything, it’s the opposite.
Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll finds that Obama’s approval rating is up, at 58%. It finds that the number who “strongly approve” of his performance is also up, to 37%.
These changes come as Republicans have turned up the heat on Obama and as the White House and its allies have dug in and gone after Republicans equally hard. So is there a connection between Obama’s rising approval numbers and the rising perception of him as a “partisan Democrat”?
Hard to say — but it does seem clear that this growing view of Obama hasn’t done anything to tarnish his “brand.” And yet we keep hearing that this brand is supposedly rooted in his willingness to be “bipartisan” or “post-partisan.” These numbers suggest that people don’t automatically equate “partisan” with “bad,” and that the success of the Obama brand is rooted in the perception that he’s acting for the good of the country, rather than his party, even when he appears partisan.
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Someone made a point the other day, I think it was Salmon Rushdie on Bill Maher’s show, that the US is the only nation where the party that wins the Presidential election feels any need at all for bipartisanship. I had never thought about it like that but he is right. Any other country, especially those with parliamentary system, they don’t give a damn about the minority. The ruling party rules and pushes their agenda so that if they fail at least they know they did it their way and if they succeed everyone knows who to praise. Bipartisanship in practice is way over rated, mostly by the Villagers. But the appearance of bipartisanship is the key and President Obama has done that. In the end because of the way our Senate rules are set up there pretty much has to be at least some limited bipartisanship but I think that election tomorrow in NY20 is going to tell a lot. If Murphy upsets Tedisco I think the Republicans had better rethink their game plan before next year or nobody will need to reach out to them because they will dissappear in Congress.
And remember that the Rasmussen poll is administered mostly by republicans for the benefit of republicans.
The disingenuous post-election proclamation by Republican propagandists that our nation was still right of center is getting duly tested! Betting fools are giving good odds that the Republican party will be in the wilderness for the next two election cycles. -Kevo
sg – I think your argument from Rushdie is compelling but with a proviso. The US is somewhat unique in having of only two viable parties. This really sets up the whole “bi” framework. Contrast with Israel, for example, where “bi” partisan just doesn’t make sense.
greg – I think your last paragraph gets to the nub of it. There’s some confusion in all of this simply as a consequence of insufficient language. “Bi-partisan” and “partisan” aren’t adequate to describe our options and don’t describe the present situation, as you are suggesting (sg points to “villagers” correctly here as the main culprits in this over-simplification of language and conception – a serial failing).
Considering Obama’s speech that brought him to public attention and the theme of it which has remained central in his conceptualizing of how American politics ought to be imagined and carried out wasn’t really “bi-partisan” in its cliched and limited sense. Rather it is a conception which pushes back against the purposeful dividing of groups and identities, and the cynical setting of them against each other for electoral gain – regardless of the damage to the polity/nation as communal entity.
Citizens (most) seem quite intelligent enough to understand those differences and subtleties.
I agree with Bernie’s distinction between the cliched notion of bipartisanship and Obama’s conceptualizing of American politics as something that shouldn’t be intentional divisive. I would add that America, with its federal system and sectionalism, has a greater stake in working for common ground than some of the countries Rushdie may be referring to, which are smaller and more homogeneous by nature–or at least by origin.
I had thought that Sargent did not trust Rasmussen’s polling? Quoting it now that it suits his purpose?
I’m surprised, no totally exhausted, at the notion that we still have to prove to Republicans and right wingers that their ideas and policies are unpopular. Didn’t the election in November prove that?
Obama ran as left of center as any candidate in 50 years and won handidly. People obviously want his policies.
Hey Greg, can you fix the paragraph spacing. Doesn’t matter how many spaces I add between paragraphs it still runs them up together.
“I’m surprised, no totally exhausted, at the notion that we still have to prove to Republicans and right wingers that their ideas and policies are unpopular. Didn’t the election in November prove that?”
Yes, but it also pruned out the Republican legislators most likely to listen to that message. This often happens to a political party that has held strongly for too long to the agenda that first brought it into power. As that agenda ages and the opposition gains traction moderate majority party legislators are the first to lose in closely contested elections. This results first in a smaller majority, and then over time that majority becomes the minority as it continues to lose seats, but as it loses seats the seats it loses are those from the least ideological districts. Thus, over time not only does the the majority become the minority, but at the same time that remnant returned to office becomes progressively more and more intensely wed to the very agenda that it causing it to lose elections.
In the 1980’s & early 90’s this happened to the Democrats, as they stayed too long in FDR’s New Deal paradigm (extended by LBJ’s Great Society agenda). Now it’s happening to the GOP as the agenda championed by Reagan becomes sclerotic and irrelevant.
It’s going to be a while before the GOP finally wakes up from its denial and starts looking for a new agenda. In the meanwhile what will probably happen first is they will keep getting simultaneously smaller and also more “conservative” (placed in quotes because their present agenda is in significant ways not all that conservative, in the word’s historical sense, so much as mildly fascist).
Yes, the Democrats lost power and members in the 1980-90’s BUT what they lost were Southern Democrats. And they lost the solid South NOT because of their progressive, New Deal programs. Rather they lost because of the Nixon Southern racist strategy. Remember Strom Thurman was a Democrat under Johnson. It was only after Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act that Strom changed to Republican.
Moderate Republicans remained a strong group in The North until the Culture Wars of Newt Gingrich sealed their fate. Their are 1-3 left in Seante (Snowe, Collins, and Specter) and almost none in House. Why vote for a pretend Democrat as the moderate Republicans are seen, when you can vote for a real Democrat?
Republicans are becoming a small regional minority party of racist, nativist, Jesus-freaks holed up in deep South and Texas. Having shed all reasonable, rational members, they feed on their own hate and fury.
chris — apologies for that. that and other tech fixes are in the works…
sbj, there are lots of us who don’t trust Rasmussen’s top line numbers these days. But that doesn’t mean the trends and internals don’t have any value. The big problem with their issue polling right now is the party weighting they use: D+1. Nobody in their right mind thinks there are only one percent more Democrats in America right now, and most other pollsters are using something closer to D+10. Or they simply aren’t weighting by party-ID at all, since frankly it doesn’t make a lot of sense for issues/approval polling with no elections in sight.
So because of that there’s a house effect that puts Rasmussen’s numbers predictably a few points lower than every other pollster. The poll is otherwise just as valid as the other trackers and the house effect stays the same, so there’s no reason not to read things into the trends we see. It’s just not OK to mix and match those numbers with those from other pollsters.
There are other problems with Rasmussen’s issue polls that don’t show up in the approval poll, notably the sometimes incredible question wording: a few weeks back they asked, “Do you think Rush Limbaugh is the defacto leader of the Republican Party, and when he says ‘jump’ they say ‘how high?’” Not exactly neutral phrasing. They also consistently pick unfriendly ways to ask about card check and health care, etc. The approval ratings questions, by contrast, are pretty straightforward and thus aren’t that different from others.