GOP hope for 2010: Voters nervous about Obama spending
By Dave Cook | 09.14.09
Republican strategists see an opening in the fact independent voters like President Obama but are nervous about his economic policies.
The Republican advocacy group Resurgent Republic conducted five focus groups in August among independents who voted for Mr. Obama in the presidential election but were undecided about whether to support a Republican or Democrat in the 2010 congressional race.
According to Whit Ayres, a founder of Resurgent Republic and a veteran Republican pollster, there were two clear findings from the focus groups. First, voters still like Obama. “They want him to succeed. They find him to be an appealing figure,” Mr. Ayres said at Monitor breakfast Monday.
On the flip side, independent voters “are very discomforted by the degree of debt, for the proposals for spending, and by what they see as mortgaging their children’s future. So words like nervous, uncertain, stressful, hurting were all part of the discussion about the economy and our fiscal situation,” Ayres said.
“If these trends you see with independents continue, the Republicans could have a very good year” in the 2010 election, he said. Ayres cautioned that much can change between now the congressional elections. “But I can tell you that the climate is significantly different today than it was at this point in the 2006 or the 2008 election cycle. So there is something going on. Whether that continues or not is going to be driven by events.”
One sign of the change in climate is that Pollster.com’s average of major national polls shows Republicans having a slight edge for the first time in several years when voters are asked which party they favor in the 2010 congressional election. The GOP leads by 41.8 percent to 40.4 percent for the Democratic Party.
Nonpartisan observers share Ayres’s view that Republican prospects could be improving. Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report recently wrote that during the summer the political situation “slipped completely out of control for President Obama and congressional Democrats.” Mr. Cook said there was a consensus that “the chances of Democratic losses going higher than 20 seats is just as good as the chances of Democratic losses going lower than 20 seats.”
And, Cook says, “a political environment that culls the Democratic herd in the House would very likely cost Democrats two to four senators, people whose votes are anything but expendable.”
Democrats have great deal riding on Obama’s ability to win passage of heathcare reform bill.
Ed Gillespie, the other founder of Resurgent Republic and a former chairman of the Republican Party, told the breakfast gathering that the Obama administration has “pretty much pushed all of the chips into the middle of the table on” healthcare.
Mr. Gillespie added that if the president “gets a bill to his desk that he can sign that has genuine bipartisan support – not bipartisan with Democrat only votes – then I think he will have pulled his presidency back from the brink. But they have taken themselves to the brink in a fairly remarkable way.”
While the GOP’s prospects for picking up seats in Congress may be improving, the party faces daunting challenges in electing a president since the party only won 31 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2008 presidential election.
“Hispanics are a growing percentage of the electorate. We are getting a decreasing share of their vote,” Gillespie said. “We have to correct that…. It is hard to see a path to the White House that doesn’t include us a getting a bigger share of the Hispanic vote than 31 percent.”
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2. Hgu | 09.14.09
“As an American they have the freedom to make that choice. ” They have freedom to not have healthcare?
Why? We don’t have the freedom not to have auto insurance?
So the republican plan is to do the same thing. Make everyone buy insurance from private insurance company. Then your insuance agent who takes 10% of your policy for his pay check can try to upsell you the equivalent of “uninsured motorist” insurance for those who still don’t get it.
Either way I am buying stock in the insurance companies. Im gonna need the capital gains profits so that i can pay my rising healthcare premiums, deductibles, co-pays, non-formulary drugs, Cobra (if i ever lose my job) and i need to save up at least $250,000 (just to pay the premiums) if i want to retire at 55 just to pay healthcare premiums so that i can finally get decent healthcare at 65 when i go on government MANDATED healthcare medicare.
But buying stock in the insurance companies wont solve the problem if i get sick, it only works if i stay perfectly healthy. If i get sick, the insurance companies will drop me like a hot potato or use an arbitrary annual cap to deny treatment- (39.6% of all claims to PacifiCare are denied).
If you like our current healthcare system… There is only one reason- YOU ARE HEALTH….Today.
3. Aaron | 09.14.09
As far as I know non of Obama’s plans are anywhere near as costly as what Bush spent over his 8 years in office. Bush is still the number one spender of all time. The republicans spent incredible amounts of money and we have nothing to show for it. Bush started with a surplus and ended with a huge debt.
4. Matthew Reed | 09.14.09
Monstrous. I give you hysteria affecting public discourse.
I’ve been diabetic since my first year of age. I shudder to think of the burden that would have been if I hadn’t been born into a family with health insurance.
Lets say you don’t have insurance. You go to a doctor. You pay x dollars.
Lets say you do. You go to a doctor. You pay y dollars, and insurance pays z dollars.
x > y + z in almost all situations.
The larger the pool of customers, the better those customers, as a whole, are able to negotiate for lower costs on everything from medication to lab fees.
This means if you’re more economically or medically disadvantaged, you pay more per medican and procedure than those more fortunate than you.
And that is morally reprehensible.
5. Splavistic | 09.15.09
To think that the outwardly bigoted GOP can win over Hispanic voters is kind of laughable. To think that people will pull support from Obama because the health care bill isn’t everything he said it would be is laughable, too. The majority of people voting GOP in the next election will be white, post-middle aged people from the South. Fortunately, that is not enough to return us to the ‘grand ole days’ of Bush.
6. Howard Lauther | 09.16.09
So the voters are nervous about “Obama”s spending”, you say? Well, let’s give that conclusion the benefit of the doubt and say they are. Then, how do you factor in the hypocrisy? For example, of the 100 million or more who may be wringing their hands over the Obama administration’s so-called spending habits, as opposed to, say, its “investment” habits, what percentage of them have credit-card balances that linger on and on? How many of them bought things they really didn’t need and couldn’t afford? How many of them have placed themselves on a strict montly budget, only using their money for the absolute necessities? How many of them want the government to display all the values of which they themselves are lacking? That sound you hear is the shattering of a facade.
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Jimmy Orr has worked in politics for the majority of his professional career working for two U.S. Senators, two Governors and one President. Most recently, Orr served as White House Spokesman and Internet Director for President George W. Bush and Special Advisor to Governor Schwarzenegger for Internet Communications.
David Cook is Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor and host of the Monitor's newsmaker breakfasts. He was the Monitor's editor from 1994 to 2001. Cook is a graduate of Principia College, served in the U.S. Army, was a Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, and is a member of the Gridiron Club, Washington's oldest journalistic organization.
1. Lucille Miller | 09.14.09
I at age 78 feel that we should go back to the drawing board regarding the Health Care legislation. We need a government plan, not run like a private insurance plan. The government isn’t into making a profit like the private insurance companies. So what if the find that people are opting for the Government insurance. If there isn’t a Medicare like plan for the younger generation, then forget all this “bruhaha”. I don’t know what you should do with the people that do not take health insurance. As an American they have the freedom to make that choice. The fine is pretty hefty for most people who can’t afford health insurance in the first place.