PPP’s first general election poll anywhere since Rick Santorum’s surge in Iowa finds that he’s the most electable of the Republican candidates in the important swing state of North Carolina. Santorum fights Obama to a 46-46 tie in the state, while Mitt Romney trails Obama 46-45. It’s not a significant difference, but Romney has tended to best the rest of the GOP field by a wide margin on the electability front in our polling.
The reason Santorum does ever so slightly better is that he takes 20% of the Democratic vote to Romney’s 17%. That’s an interesting finding and what it suggests to me is that socially conservative Democrats might be more inclined to vote for Santorum than Romney because he provides a clearer contrast with Obama on social issues.
What are they doing polling that many Democrats in a red state? *(Updated to swing state)
A recentRasmussen pollshowed Democrat party ID, nationwide, at an all time low:
During December, 35.4% of Americans considered themselves Republicans. That’s up from 34.3% in Novemberand just below the high for the year of 35.6% reached in May.
At the same time, just 32.7% of adults said they were Democrats, down from 34.9% in November. The previous low for Democrats was 33.0% in August of this year.
CORRECTION!:
My eyes were playing tricks on me, again.
The PPP poll was of NC, not SC as I originally reported.
Claire McCaskill, who’s facing a tough election, this November, kicked off her revisionist history Energy Tour, last Thursday. At a campaign energy tour stop in Hannibal, MO, she sounded less than optimistic about her chances, this Fall, characterizing herself as “kind of an underdog”. She noted that there is a tendency among people fed up with everyone in Washington to want to “get rid of all of them”. She characterized herself as someone in the “moderate middle” as opposed to someone on “the extreme” which she hopes will be enough to win her a second term, “but if not – it’s not the end of the world.”
The Democratic senator kicked off her tour Thursday with a visit to an electric cooperative in New London, Mo. She will be touring power plants across Missouri this month as part of what she is billing as her “Hometown Energy Tour,” where she plans to discuss her support for national energy policies that she said are “practical, accessible and affordable” and don’t penalize states like Missouri that largely rely on coal to generate electricity.
Missouri Republicans were quick to attack McCaskill’s attention to energy policies Friday, with the offices of Republican Senate candidate John Brunner and the Missouri Republican Party sending news releases stating McCaskill’s voting record does not match energy policies that work for businesses and individuals.
“Senator McCaskill has a record of saying one thing in Missouri and voting a different way in Washington when it comes to issues on cap-and-trade and issues on the utilization of coal to produce power,” said Lloyd Smith, executive director of the Missouri Republican Party.
Smith said it’s ironic to Republicans that McCaskill is traveling the state talking about how to save money on energy when she did not vote against allowing the EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule to go forward, which according to a recent article in the Sikeston Standard Democrat could cause a 33 percent increase in electricity rates for Sikeston Board of Municipal Utilities customers.
The NRSCpiled on with some more inconvenient truths about the so called moderate:
…when a cap-and-trade bill sponsored by California’s ultra-liberal Senator Barbara Boxer came before the Senate for a vote in 2008, McCaskill stood with Boxer and voted to move it forward. Fortunately, Senate Republicans, and not Senator McCaskill, ultimately blocked this disastrous bill from moving forward any further.
“It’s clear that Senator McCaskill is desperate to distract Missourians from her very liberal record in Washington. The reality is that when the rubber met the road on cap-and-trade, Claire McCaskill stood with liberal California Senator Barbara Boxer instead of standing up for Missouri’s energy sector,” National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) spokesman Brian Walsh said today.
More recently, contrary to “bucking her party” as she is claiming today, McCaskill’s silence was deafening just two weeks ago when the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agencyunveiled a massive new rule just before Christmas Day for power plants that will cost American businesses – and ultimately consumers – almost $10 billion in new regulatory costs.
Even a select few Senate Democrats sounded the alarm bell as well. For example, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin said, “Today’s announcement of yet another onerous rule by the EPA completely ignores the devastating impact these regulations will have on jobs and our economy, not only in West Virginia but across this nation.”
And Missouri’s junior U.S. Senator Roy Blunt was similarly outspoken saying, “This rule would increase electricity prices by nearly 20 percent in areas like Missouri, which is very reliant on coal. I’m going to continue working to stop rules like this and other job-destroying regulations that will fall squarely on Missouri families and job creators who are still struggling to get back on their feet.”
In contrast to the concerns expressed by Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, Missouri’s Roy Blunt and many other Senators, Claire McCaskill was silent.
“Whether it’s ObamaCare, the failed stimulus or the massive over-regulation by President Obama’s EPA which will hurt Missouri’s economy, we’ve seen a consistent pattern of Claire McCaskill standing side-by-side with President Obama. No amount of election-year gimmicks like this ‘energy tour’ will change that,” Walsh concluded.
“We are excited to be able to showcase the Republican candidates for U.S. Senate at our statewide Lincoln Days celebration, which is the largest gathering of GOP supporters and activists in the state,” said David Cole, Chairman of the Missouri Republican Party. “Defeating Claire McCaskill is incredibly important for the future of our state and our nation—and we have three great candidates, any of whom would make an outstanding United States Senator.”
“I look forward to being able to share my conservative views and hear from Republicans about how to solve our country’s problems and get the nation headed in a new direction,” said Senate candidate Sarah Steelman.
“The traditional town hall forum is a mainstay of American politics and has always been a highlight of the State Lincoln Days. This year should prove particularly interesting as we focus on the pivotal U.S. Senate race. This senate race could well change the power balance in Washington D.C. I look forward to spending this time with dedicated grassroots leaders from across Missouri,” said Senate candidate Todd Akin.
“I look forward to participating in this important forum at the statewide Missouri Lincoln Days in Kansas City. I can’t think of a more appropriate venue for a healthy exchange of ideas,” said Senate candidate John Brunner.
The 2012 Missouri Lincoln Days celebration will take place February 17-19 in Kansas City, MO.
This new RNC video, via Jim Geraghty, is a reminder of what Obama was telling voters four years ago, juxtaposed with today’s reality:
Indeed, once upon a time, the “Obamessiah’s” soaring rhetoric inspired near-euphoria in liberals:
“Democrats, independents and Republicans who are tired of the division and distraction that has clouded Washington, who know that we can disagree without being disagreeable, who understand that, if we mobilize our voices to challenge the money and influence that stood in our way and challenge ourselves to reach for something better, there is no problem we cannot solve, there is no destiny that we cannot fulfill.”
But that barely scrapes the surface of how divisive this President has been. The “hope and change” candidate who was sold as having “a first class temperament”, has proven to be a petty, thin skinned, whiny, vindictive dictator.
For the first time in our nation’s history, we have a President who has denigrated protesters by calling them, “teabaggers”, and said that, instead of protesting his destructive policies, “they should be thanking me”. While stumping in 2010, he extorted a Hispanic audience to “punish their enemies” at the ballot box. His administration actually encourages citizens to inform on each other.He’s turned the DOJ into an arm of the radicalized left- a political weapon to use against his enemies, (which happens to include the rule of law), and is seemingly intent on helping Obama steal the election in November. I’ve lost count of the number of (Republican leaning) states they’ve sued over voter ID laws and immigration policy. Anyone keeping a running tab? Fast and Furious, (along with a number of other, smaller gunwalking programs) is the worst scandal in American history, not that anyone would know because the MSM refuses to push the story.
The seriousness of our decline in terms of honoring the Constitution and the Rule of Law cannot be overestimated. The US is slowly seeing its form of government disappear and the rate of deterioration is suddenly accelerating.
Massive change rarely comes all at once. It comes in small increments, almost unnoticed, until one day it is recognized but too late to reverse. That is exactly how the institutional metamorphosis from the most cultured nation in the world degenerated into Nazi Germany.
***
The acceleration of this decline under President Obama is frightening. From Doug Ross@Journalcomes this list of likely abuses of the Constitution and usurping of powers never intended.
If you’ve not yet seen Doug’s list, I urge you to hit the link.
It’s not just a few excitable right wing bloggers who are alarmed. No less than the highly esteemed, Charles Krauthammer, was moved to call Obama“more of a Hugo Chavez than a Teddy Roosevelt”, after his class warfare speech in December.
Why isn’t the RNC tapping into any of this? The unpresidential sneers, name-calling, race-baiting, class warfare rhetoric, and obnoxious victory laps? They need to find a way to expose the alarming totalitarian impulses of this administration in an ad designed to wake up a populous more interested in Snooky’s latest exploits, or this week’s American Idol winner — Not yet another “this is what he said then and this is what he says now” run of the mill, politics as usual kind of ad. Most voters understand that politicians lie and flip flop. Everybody knows the economy sucks.
The Left’s growing support for a soft authoritarianism is reminiscent of the 1930s, when many on both right and left looked favorably at either Stalin’s Soviet experiment or its fascist and National Socialist rivals. Tom Friedman of the New York Times recently praised Chinese-style authoritarianism for advancing the green agenda. The “reasonably enlightened group” running China, he asserted, was superior to our messy democracy in such things as subsidizing green industry. Steven Rattner, the investment banker and former Obama car czar, dismisses the problems posed by China’s economic and environmental foibles and declares himself “staunchly optimistic” about the future of that country’s Communist Party dictatorship. And it’s not just the gentry liberals identifying China as their model: labor leader Andy Stern, formerly the president of the Service Employees International Union and a close ally of the White House, celebrates Chinese authoritarianism and says that our capitalistic pluralism is headed for “the trash heap of history.” The Chinese, Stern argues, get things done.
A victorious Obama administration could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model. The mechanisms of control already exist. The bureaucratic apparatus, the array of policy czars and regulatory enforcers commissioned by the executive branch, has grown dramatically under Obama. Their ability to control and prosecute people for violations relating to issues like labor and the environment—once largely the province of states and localities—can be further enhanced. In the post-election environment, the president, using agencies like the EPA, could successfully strangle whole industries—notably the burgeoning oil and natural gas sector—and drag whole regions into recession. The newly announced EPA rules on extremely small levels of mercury and other toxins, for example, will sharply raise electricity rates in much of the country, particularly in the industrial heartland; greenhouse-gas policy, including, perhaps, an administratively imposed “cap and trade,” would greatly impact entrepreneurs and new investors forced to purchase credits from existing polluters. On a host of social issues, the new progressive regime could employ the Justice Department to impose national rulings well out of sync with local sentiments. Expansions of affirmative action, gay rights, and abortion rights could become mandated from Washington even in areas, such as the South, where such views are anathema.
This future can already been seen in fiscally challenged California. The state should be leading a recovery, not lagging behind the rest of the country. But in a place where Obama-style progressives rule without effective opposition, the clerisy has already enacted a score of regulatory mandates that are chasing businesses, particularly in manufacturing, out of the state. It has also passed land-use policies designed to enforce density, in effect eliminating the dream of single-family homes for all but the very rich in much of the state.
A nightmare scenario would be a constitutional crisis pitting a relentless executive power against a disgruntled, alienated opposition lacking strong, intelligent leadership. Over time, the new authoritarians would elicit even more opposition from the “dodos” who make up the majority of Americans residing in the great landmass outside the coastal strips and Chicago. The legacy of the Obama years—once so breathlessly associated with hope and reconciliation—may instead be growing pessimism and polarization.
Americans need to be scared to the polls in November.
