Voters like Congress better than the Arizona legislature

According to a June survey, the Arizona legislature is less popular than Congress. And when you look at it more closely it's even worse.

by Amy B Wang
The Arizona Republic

Two-thirds of Arizonans who participated in a research panel are dissatisfied with how the state Legislature is dealing with Arizona's budget and tax issues, according to a June report by the Morrison Institute.

Two-thirds is about 66%. In contrast, the current disapproval rating for Congress (which has never been very good, because Congress has been a favorite punching bag for people to blame things on for decades) is 60.8% in the current RCP polling average.

But it gets worse than that. Most of the polls in the RCP average are not just surveys of 'adults' but most are instead surveys of 'likely voters' (though some may split the difference and use 'registered voters.') This filters out people who may not really care very much and may not even care enough to bother to actually register or show up at the polls and vote.

However, the Arizona Republic article goes on to say:

Fewer than half of the respondents said they kept tabs on current public-policy processes, including news about the Arizona state budget.

When researchers narrowed it down to this group, the rate of those dissatisfied with state lawmakers jumped to 80 percent.

So among people who are actually paying attention, four out of five disapproved with the job the legislature was doing-- in June. The language may not have specifically said, 'likely voters' but it's an almost automatic assumption that the people who are paying attention to the legislature would probably be considered 'likely voters' with very few exceptions. So out of a group of voters likely to vote next year, the approval rating for the legislature was 20% (assuming that we generously count all those who don't 'disapprove' as 'approve' and so give the lege the assumed support of all those who say they have 'no opinion,' 'refuse to answer' or 'aren't sure'-- really, we're doing everything we can here to help them out.) Twenty percent approval is dangerously into 'throw the bums out' territory.

Ah, but that doesn't even tell the whole story. Note that this survey was taken during JUNE. June was the last month of the scheduled regular session. Likely the survey was taken after the June 4 budget vote which would have decimated schools and state agencies while giving away a quarter billion dollar tax cut, and during which relations between the Governor and the Republican leadership in the legislature got so bad that she went to court and sued them to try and get them to send her the budget so she could veto it. However, since then we've gotten no budget, had a full month of special session and still no budget (though some of the proposals we've seen are even worse than the June 4 budget.) I doubt if ANYONE thinks that the legislature is more popular (or even still is as popular) today compared to where it was in June.

Pity the poor legislators. I wonder what the state legislative GOP leaders would say if someone pointed out to them that more likely voters approve of the job that Nancy Pelosi's Congress is doing, than approve of the job they are doing.

Then again, earlier this year Congress was able to pass, and the President did sign, a budget.

Presidential approval holding steady at 60%

Lately the conservative side of the wonkisphere has been all a-twitter (literally).

Note: I'm not sure if anyone else has used the term 'wonkisphere' yet but if not I will use it to describe those of us who look forward to the release of every new poll the way a loyal fan of Star Trek waits for the newest Priceline.com commercial just to see something new, and read political tea leaves the way an archeologist reads pottery shards.

They are feeling blessed with new life since this week the Realclearpolitics Presidential approval poll average dipped below 60%. Right now it registers at 59.6% (that's right, whole numbers just are so pedestrian for us denizens of the wonkisphere.) The RCP average is an average of several of the most recent polls taken on approval of the President.

Now, I'm not sure exactly what 60% is supposed to mean. To me it's just a number. But when a President is above that number he is perceived to be a Goliath, perhaps vulnerable to a single well placed stone but otherwise crushing any who dare to get in his way. Below 60%, all of a sudden the armor comes off and out steps a mere mortal. That's when the other side doesn't just sling an occasional 'test-stone,' to try and find the chink in the armor, but out come the rhetorical darts and arrows and the poisoned pens for a full out frontal assault.

A closer examination of the polls that are currently being used by the average suggests that they should go ahead and sheathe the darts and quiver the arrows and cap the pens. The seven polls in the current incarnation of the RCP average are the Gallup tracking poll, the Rasmussen tracking poll, and polls from Marist, Associated Press/GfK, Quinnipiac, USA Today/Gallup and Democracy Corps, which states up front that it is a Democratic polling firm (interestingly enough though Democracy Corps has often given Obama approval numbers below the RCP average.)

Of these polls, Marist actually shows that Obama actually went up a point from the last time they were polled. They showed he had approval of 55% on April 21-23 and this month that has gone up to 56%. Democracy Corps, the last time they polled (May 10-12) had Obama with an approval rating of 58% and it is now up to 59%. Quinnipiac shows the reverse numbers, with Obama falling from 59% on April 21-27 to 58% now. Obama's best marks come from the AP poll, at 64% approval, and that is also the same number where they had him on April 16-20. The only even marginally significant decline among the five standard polls is in the USA Today/Gallup poll. They have him at 61% today and his approval was 64% when they polled it at the end of March.

As for the tracking polls, it is true that Gallup (the same organization that showed Obama with a slight decline when they polled with USA Today) shows Obama's approval slowly going down. Or does it? It appears so, but then if you look back a little further, the 60% today is higher than it was near the end of March or beginning of April.

Rasmussen tracking has Presidential approval at 58%. However, Rassmussen has not showed it at 60% since March 4. So in fact 58% is good with this outfit.

Excluded from this average because their last polls are too old are several organizations that in the past have showed Obama with high marks for approval. These include CBS News, Pew Research, Ipsos/McClatchey, Fox News (!), CNN/Opinion Research, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times(not the same as CBS News) and NBC/Wall St. Journal.

So it appears that this result is more a factor of the specific pollsters used this go around (and their differences in polling methods) than it is a function of any underlying trend.

Barack Obama has been remarkably steady around 60% for at least the past two months, and I believe this trend will continue.

Don't worry, Goliath is alive and well, which should make the right happy because they can go back to slinging stones.