Deficit Public Opinion Goes Missing (CJR)

Deficit Public Opinion Goes Missing
By Erika Fry
July 13, 2011 03:52 PM


We’ve been reading that lots of people that matter are not happy with developments in those deficit reductions talks.

But what about the people that make them matter? Where’s public opinion on all of this?

Why, they’re unhappy too!—but not for the same reason that no-new-revenue Republican Eric Cantor is.

You wouldn’t know this from the media coverage—from which discussion of public opinion has been almost completely absent—but data suggests that deficit discussions on the Hill have unfolded in precisely the way a majority of American voters don’t want. (By the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll count, Republicans and Democrats are neck-and-neck in how badly they’re doing on reducing the debt.)

Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia University who specializes in the role of public opinion in American politics, notes public opinion has not been part of the story.

(snip)

In a national survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, from late May 2011, a majority of those polled supported taxing the rich, eliminating corporate tax breaks, and cutting foreign and defense spending abroad. A majority disapproved of reducing Social Security benefits, raising the retirement age, and taxing health insurance. Also unpopular by were cuts to funding for state education and infrastructure budgets (73% disapproval) and cuts to programs for lower-income Americans (54%).

In Coverage of Jobs Report, Misplaced Attention to Horse Race
By NATE SILVER

The jobs numbers are awful, but they’ve also provided fodder for some poor political punditry.

I won’t name names, since the people in question are normally thoughtful writers. But you can already find an article keyed off the news with the headline “How a one-term president is made.” And a political scientist in my Twitter feed wrote of how numbers like these will have Mitt Romney “measuring the drapes” in the White House.

I do not mean to suggest that the unemployment numbers are unimportant as a news story. To the contrary, recent polls find that four times as many people list jobs rather than the budget deficit as a top priority, even though the latter issue has gotten more press attention lately.