On Thursday I wrote about a poll in Florida in which half the respondents agreed that “Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to insure that Barack Obama is not re-elected.” Remarkably, even a lot of Republicans and conservatives agreed with that statement.
But how about nationally? None of the big polling outfits has asked the question quite that pointedly yet, but the Washington Post recently asked a Statement A/Statement B question in which half of all respondents agreed with Statement A: “President Obama is making a good faith effort to deal with the country’s economic problems, but the Republicans in Congress are playing politics by blocking his proposals and programs.” Not quite the same, but in the same ballpark.
But is that mostly just Democrats and Dem-leaning indies who agree with that? Greg Sargent took a look at the internals and found that moderates and independents poll a bit higher than 50%, but Republicans are bringing down the average: “The overall number is lower, at 50 percent, because a hilarously meager nine percent of Republicans believe this to be the case.” I can think of two ways to interpret this:
- The Post question was more partisan than the Florida poll question because it starts out with “President Obama is making a good faith effort….” Lots of Republicans are going to choke on that even if they agree that congressional GOP leaders are indeed trying to sabotage Obama. This explains why the Post numbers are lower than in the Florida poll.
- The Post question was tamer than the one in the Florida poll, since it only suggests Republicans are “playing politics,” not “intentionally stalling” efforts to revive the economy. But even at that, most Republicans in the Post weren’t buying it. This suggests that the Florida poll is an outlier.
For now, I’m going with the second explanation. But I’d still be interested in seeing some more national-level polling on this with the question worded more directly. If I see one, I’ll let you know.
