Posted on 07/09/2012 2:51:22 AM PDT by Libloather
Hill Poll: Majority feel Obama has changed country for worse
By Sheldon Alberts - 07/09/12 05:00 AM ET
Two-thirds of likely voters say President Obama has kept his 2008 campaign promise to change America — but it’s changed for the worse, according to a sizable majority.
A new poll for The Hill found 56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership.
The results signal broad voter unease with the direction the nation has taken under Obama’s leadership and present a major challenge for the incumbent Democrat as he seeks reelection this fall.
Conducted for The Hill by Pulse Opinion Research, the poll comes in the wake of last month’s Supreme Court decision that upheld the primary elements of Obama’s signature healthcare legislation.
It found 68 percent of likely voters — regardless of whether they approve or disapprove of Obama — believe the president has substantially transformed the country since his 2009 inauguration.
The feeling that Obama has changed the country for the worse is strongest among Republicans, at 91 percent, compared to 71 percent of Democrats who support Obama’s brand of change.
Strikingly, 1-in-5 Democrats say they feel Obama has changed the United States for the worse.
Compared to the sentiment about Obama’s impact, fewer people see presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney as a candidate who will change the country dramatically if elected.
Still, 50 percent of people think Romney will bring a “significant” level of change — a finding that may reflect the desire among anti-Obama voters for a reversal of the president’s policies.
Debate about Obama’s first-term legacy has intensified since the Supreme Court ruled the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to be constitutional.
The healthcare legislation, once fully implemented, would usher in the most sweeping changes to the nation’s social safety net since the 1960s.
To Obama’s supporters, the ruling was a validation of his 2008 campaign theme of “change we can believe in.” At that time, Obama hinted at his ambitions to become a transformative president in the mold of Ronald Reagan.
“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it,” he told the Reno Gazette-Journal in January 2008.
Beyond the healthcare law, Obama won passage of the Dodd-Frank financial industry reforms, generally viewed as the biggest Wall Street regulatory changes since the 1930s.
In the absence of major immigration legislation, Obama recently eased deportation rules for young illegal immigrants brought to the country as children.
Obama’s ambitions for big change fell short in other areas. He has been unable to pass climate change legislation or repeal the Bush-era tax rates.
On social issues, Obama recently became the first president to endorse gay marriage.
Independent of voter opinions about how the country has changed, The Hill Poll found an overwhelming majority of voters — 89 percent — view the choice between Obama and Romney as important in terms of the future impact on the country.
Almost half (47 percent) say they are paying more attention to this year’s election than the 2008 vote. Republicans are generally paying more attention than Democrats — 56 percent to 44 percent — to the 2012 campaign compared to 2008.
Among centrists, views are evenly split on how Obama has changed the country — with 40 percent saying the United States is better today and 42 percent saying it is worse off. Eighty percent of liberals think Obama has changed the country for the better.
There is a marked difference of opinion along racial lines, with just 29 percent of whites saying Obama has changed the country for the better compared to 92 percent of blacks.
The poll was conducted among 1,000 likely voters on July 5 and has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
DITTOS. . . . . . .
The ongoing saga here is that most small-town Democrats and state Democrats are losing support. The fight in November is twice as hard on them as they’d normally expect. So there is no pep talk going on at the small-town level for the President.
Did you notice that besides Rassmussen, we finally got a poll of Likely Voters? Seems like all the other trash has been more Adults and sparsely Registered Voters by Gallup and the rest. I believe this is partially due to their efforts to skew the Real Clear Politics average thing that to me is totally useless because of the bogus outliers they seem intent to include.
29 percent of whites saying Obama has changed the country for the better compared to 92 percent of blacks.
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When 95% of the Blacks vote for a candidate just because he/she is Black, IS THAT NOT RACIST????
Did you notice that besides Rassmussen, we finally got a poll of Likely Voters?
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Yep; I noticed.
He HAS succeeded in doing bad, and I HATE when I hear the Pubbies say he’s FAILED! NO HE HASN’T...he set out to TRANSFORM this country and he has for sure. We now have a DICTATOR!!
“Did you notice that besides Rassmussen, we finally got a poll of Likely Voters?”
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It has been my understanding that Rasmussen is THE poll
to pay any attention to.
I am, however, often dismayed to see that Obozo does not have a linear decline.
A few days ago he was -18 or -20?
Now he is back to -15.
He should have been tanking from the day he took office
and should now be in the toilet, ready for flushing.
Buyers Remorse!
Your assumption is it is the same sample each time. That is not the case.
As I have noted in other threads, pollsters are businessmen first. They have to attract not only new business to keep paying all the employees they hire but they also need to keep the current ones. They are not in the business to do polling on their own. Somebody has to pay for it and thus when you pay for something you have a good idea of what you are looking for.
So what does any rational businessman do? He provides a service the customer is willing to pay very big bucks for in this case. If you ever took any kind of statistics in school, you know exactly what I mean in that a pollster has the ability to deliver to the customer what they are paying for. This far out even Rasmussen looks like a roller coaster but get into the 30 day area and watch those results start to flatten dramatically. Even they know that most in this country don’t pay attention enough until then to notice the fluctuations at this time.
So they are more inclined to deliver the product to those who are looking to do nothing but make news with a poll in hopes of changing the end result that would not have been possible when more people are actually paying attention.
When I see polling of likely voters, his goose is cooked. One of the worst to use for a bellwether is the Real Clear Politics since it is nothing but all of the polls reported, irregardless of methodology used, are averaged. As with any average, outliers will skew the result greatly considering the number of polls used is small and the outliers are way off.
“When 95% of the Blacks vote for a candidate just because he/she is Black, IS THAT NOT RACIST????”
Of course it is racist. If any other demographic (except maybe Hispanics) voted as a block, it would be called racism. It doesn’t help the country, and it doesn’t promote racial harmony by ignoring this racism. Does anyone doubt that Holder is a racist?
And remember the D’rat party has ALWAYS been the home for racists - from the KKK to Margaret Sanger’s PP to the D’rat southern Govs who attempted to stop school integration to the rhyming reverends.
“So what does any rational businessman do? He provides a service the customer is willing to pay very big bucks for in this case.”
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Thank you...
I had assumed that Rasmussen was the only poll that was on the up and up, and touted to be the best.
I guess I assumed wrong.
How stupid can 35% of Americans be?
Changed for the better??
Obama has Americans at each others throats.
Race relations have gone bad, Class relations have gone bad,People are out of work,People are on unemployent ,Millions are on food stamps and the government is advertising for more people to get food stamps, Our country is laughed at all over the world.We are printing money to hand to Palestinians , and the Muslims , Mexicans, and Morons are gaining strength.
Logic is your friend. You just have to step back enough to see the forest of the trees.
It took me to be a party in a legal dispute to understand, in general, that the civil justice system is not about right and wrong. It is merely a life support system for attorneys. In a case I was involved with, everything was going along really well until the Judge inquired what each party had paid so far for their legal representation. When it was made known that I paid less to that point, as well as the rate, the whole thing turned on a dime. The Judge even went on to declare that Prozac and Zanax were not psychotropic medications and went on to threaten contempt if we asserted it again in his court.
That one event was my awakening that there is essentially nothing altruistic in our society today and everyone has an agenda. I just step back far enough to see the whole forest.
And then you have the polls showing the anointed fraud leading Romney 48% to 45% nationally.???????????
We need one more thing in order to interpret thispoll: the political demographics of those 1000 likely voters. Without that info, the poll means nothing.
Romney, who i will vote for, is making me sick to my stomach with this ridiculous campaign.
He is squandering the chance of a lifetime by acting like John Kerry, but worse.
Between him on the jet ski and his tepid response to the jobs data, his campaign is falling off the cliff w its timidity.
I’m disgusted so far.
Despite all that, the presidential race is a tossup.
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