I actually made this thread on request after a couple people got burned by bad polling during the election cycle. Some people saw my posts months in advance explaining why Rasmussen/Gallup/others were off so when that ended up happening it brought a lot of questions. Because I'm prone to go weeks/months/years without checking the website I figured I'd update those people and any others with a thread where they can look at everything at once, because I tend to purposefully keep my inbox full (I still get random Mediator requests and questions about years-old guides to Ladder Slasher for whatever reason). I don't actually get the time you really need to analyze polling at the most beneficial level, but access to reputable data is a great substitute for the busy. A lot of people have shown interest in polling dating back to last November both here and obviously elsewhere, so while you may not care about the subject there are plenty of people that do.



But Congress isn't doing politically expedient things. For every one last-second measure like a fiscal cliff compromise that saves themselves from a manufactured crisis there are literally hundreds of bills or proposals that do not move an inch that people DO want them to do the right thing and work on. They're unpopular because they don't do anything, and a minority in each caucus deliberately tries to keep the body from "doing the right things." It's not a secret that both the House and the Senate are historically poor at doing their job. The House has passed a record few bills, and the Senate continues to set records for filibusters and cloture votes and then comes back and breaks their own record. People want them to start accomplishing things instead of blocking every single thing they can. Congress' approval rating is one of the strongest components of the argument that they should be focused solely on what people want.

We don't have a "right thing" legislative archetype. When one view offers a policy proposal that they feel is doing the right thing the competing view will feel it's the wrong thing. We can't let policy debates sink to the level where facts don't matter, what people want doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is that the people that are proposing it think it's the right thing to do. That gets us nowhere. We're seeing this play out in real time in the budget battle. Ryan offers his "budget" and he supports it based on the idea that we can't get to where we want to go without "the hard choices" he had to make, and Senate Democrats have offered what they think is the right thing for the country: prioritizing growth while raising the revenue that plummeted and creating savings in the fastest-growing expenditures. If we just temporary block out all the public support/criticism for these plans you're left with Ryan pushing the same budget he always has because he thinks his approach is the right thing to do (despite all the flaws, most importantly the fact that it doesn't even have a valid starting point), and left with Democrats advocating the same budget framework that they just won an election on. Ryan and his people think that new revenue of any kind isn't doing the right thing because of their constant (and inaccurate) misrepresentation of our budget problems as strictly a spending problem, and the Democrats obviously don't think that block granting Medicaid, privatizing Medicare, and everything else the Ryan Budget does is the right thing for the country.

If we're still ignoring public support to determine how our officials should legislate the only path forward is to hammer out the differences in the resolutions like the chamber's used to do, and as I've said many times that will never happen with a Ryan budget given the fact that it's not actually a budget. The leaps he had to make in order to adhere to his party's demands make it impossible to put the resolutions together. Ryan relies on Obama accomplishments (including the Medicare savings that he lied about relentlessly last year) but at the same time gets rid of various parts of the same policies that he doesn't like. He keeps the cost-controlling measures of the ACA, but he gets rid of the "care" for 30-45 million along with his gutting of Medicaid. He also claims he has to keep the fiscal cliff revenue increases that Obama fought for "because they're law" (as if the Affordable Care Act isn't), but really does so because it's even more impossible for his budget to balance without it. He still slashes revenue and rates but does so with the same game of "we'll just cut loopholes, don't ask me which ones."All of these things make it impossible to put these two budgets together, just like it's always been impossible to pass a budget while the GOP allows Paul Ryan to craft it's budget.

Representatives have to legislate based on what the electorate wants and not just on some idea that they're convinced what they're proposing is what's best for the country. Paul Ryan can spout his same delusions 24/7 for the next twenty years, no one that's serious about budgets is buying it and he and his "budgets" are Exhibit A of why representatives need to adhere to the electorate and their wishes instead of just pursuing whatever narrow interest they feel like doing at the time. The system requires them to work together, because there's no other way to serve the interests of 650,000, x million, and xxx million in a responsible way.

2014 Pennsylvania Governor
Some bad news came for current Governor Tom Corbett in the form of new PPP and Quinnipiac polls. Quinnipiac found that Corbett can't crack 42% in any hypothetical matchup; he trails 2010 Senate candidate Joe Sestak (37%-48%), Rep. Allyson Schwartz (39%-42%), state Senator Mike Stack (39%-40%), ties businessman Tom Wolf (39%-39%), and leads businessman Tom Knox (40%-39%) and state Treasurer Rob McCord (42%-38%). He also trailed popular Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski 38%-44%, but Pawlowski recently said he's focused on his new job and hasn't thought of challenging Corbett despite being 2nd in Quinnipiac's recent poll that measured the strength of each potential Democratic challenger. We seem to still be inching towards the inevitable Corbett vs. Schwartz battle. PPP's numbers were a little harder on Corbett, having him trail Schwartz (34%-45%), Sestak (34%-45%), McCord (34%-45%), Wolf (33%-42%), and even ex-Secretary of Environmental Protection John Hanger (34%-41%). Quinnipiac used an unusually-small sample so I imagine the real numbers fall somewhere between these two surveys.

2014 New Jersey Senate
50% of respondents in a new Fairleigh Dickinson poll said they want Cory Booker to get the nod to replace Senator Frank Lautenberg, while 4% prefer Representative Frank Pallone and 7% support Rush Holt. Booker leads 52%-41% in a hypothetical general election matchup against Geraldo Rivera.

North Carolina
Voters only approve 38%-52% of the way the GOP is running the government. Governor Pat McCrory's job approval is back to 49%-35% after hellish January and February numbers. The Republican legislature's favorability sits at 36%-50%. 56% of voters oppose the GOP's decision to block the Medicaid expansion vs. 26% that support it. Voters support stronger national gun laws (53%-38%), the assault weapons ban (50%-41%). Barack Obama's job approval rating sits at 47%-50% while Richard Burr remains at 37%-37%.

LOL! Don't you DARE go mischaracterizing the Democrat's victory as a sanction of their economic and budgetary policies. Romney carried those groups. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/2012-exit-polls/#United-States Sorry, the Democrat's voting demographics think our economy is in "excellent or good" shape. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

And then you're going to try passing off the ACA as cost-controlling? For who? You mean how they provide tax incentives to subsidize the labor expenses of small business? How does that address spiraling costs for the general public? Perhaps you mean the mandates about the percentages of premiums that "must be put towards healthcare?" Let me know how price controls work all of a sudden when they fail historically. All this aside from the fact that the ACA takes in HALF of what it spends. And those 30-45 million wouldn't have their "care" removed, they still get seen, just like today.

Update
Coincidentally Rasmussen just released a poll today that found Paul Ryan's favorability sits at a lowly 35%-54%, which signifies a 15-point drop since he was announced as Mitt Romney's VP choice last August. I wonder if the actual numbers are even lower, but even if the numbers are dead on that's a serious drop in of itself. It doesn't appear the third edition of his budget went over too terribly well.



Yours is an assumption that relies on people being single-issue voters, which we know not everyone is. The economy was cited as the #1 issue and the electorate was given two entirely different proposals for how to improve it and the result is history: The Democrats won the presidency in an electoral landslide, they gained 2 seats in the Senate despite their most-vulnerable class being up (their ND win was almost entirely due to the unpopularity of the Ryan budget interestingly enough), and they received more than a million more votes and a net gain in the House. If the Republican party wasn't so hilariously disconnected from the electorate on the other issues that people cited as also being important then they'd have had a better election cycle than they did. The point is that Obama and Senate Democrats are still advocating the exact same budget framework that they won on last year, and the Republicans are still advocating the exact same budget framework that they lost on last year. The Democrats offered a balanced approach of spending cuts and revenue increases and people preferred that in November and they still prefer it today by wide margins as we've seen in this thread. The Republicans offered and are still offering the same things that aren't popular whether it's completely gutting Medicaid (to use the "savings" to halfway finance another massive tax cut), or to privatize Medicare (to keep their constituency of current beneficiaries happy while pissing off all the future beneficiaries that aren't voting for them anyway), and people still don't want it.

Also, stop with the straw man crap. I'm not "passing off the Affordable Care Act as cost-controlling," because that's not what this is about. I only accurately stated that Ryan retained every single cost-controlling measure of taxes and penalties that the law created in his new budget while at the same time calling for all the "care" provisions to be stripped. Whether you happen to think the Affordable Care Act controls costs is irrelevant, the point is that he clearly sees the budget value of the act or else he'd have gotten rid of the entire thing like his party usually calls for. Instead he used its revenues to make his impossible task of offering a balanced budget within ten years that much easier on himself. Amusingly you still don't seem to get it: your narrow opinions don't decide what policy is the "right thing to do," nor do they reflect what people want. And by several economic metrics our economy IS in good shape, especially in the context that those people were answering a question when they were filling out a ballot and the last time that happened in 2008 and 2010 the economy was in considerably worse shape than it was last November.

This post was edited by JayKwik on Mar 18 2013 01:53pm

He needs to stop proposing shit he knows won't pass.

True, but he says if he and the party did anything else they'd be "compromising on their principles." That argument's not without merit but it sounds like it's coming from someone that has no earthly idea what the fuck they're doing in Washington D.C., they aren't there to get every single thing they want they are there to compromise. Paul Ryan still thinks he's living in 2000-2006 where he got to vote for every single big-spending program that the Bush administration wanted and if anyone disagreed with them then they'd just call them a terrorist and move on. Paul Ryan's not going to change, when they actually get serious about a long-term deal they're going to need to dump his ass and find someone else. They've got Dave Camp, I don't know what the hell they think this hypocrite for.

Its totally a bs excuse. Prioritizing your goals does not compromise your principles even slightly ><

I do not make that assumption, I am just illustrating that Obama's victory (which was NOT a landslide, as much as Democrats vainly try to paint it as such - 56% of the electoral votes) came on the strength of issues Republicans didn't/don't poll well on: healthcare, the environment and (justifiably) foreign policy. When you combine issues, a person is probably more likely to have supported Mittens if their concerns were both the economy and the budget, the economy and being worse off today, or the budget deficit and just about anything else. Obama is more likely to have taken combinations of the economy with healthcare and the economy with being better off today. But it is also clear that the voting public, as it relates to the economy and especially the budget did NOT hand Obama some mandate to do as he wished, yet he continues to govern as if he was.

Nice to see you admit that. And you should stop building straw men by continuing to harp on Ryan's budget, because I've already told you I don't support it as not going far enough. What you fail to get is that what people want is not necessarily the right thing to do (echo). People WANT their politicians to steal from another group to give them goodies, clearly visible, plain as day. We do not institute government to legalize theft, but to safeguard against it.

Econometrics like real GDP? You mean the extra $200B GDP that comes at the expense of $1T in added debt? Great tradeoff. How about real income per capita? Sorry, that's fallen. Unemployment is nowhere near "good."

I have not been paying attention however if for a 1T investment for an increase of .2T in GDP yearly that is a good investment. If its an ongoing expense then no.

This, of course is the problem.