Sen. Kerry increases lead over Bush in Gallup poll taken over weekend

You will have plenty of time to crack jokes when you are































...living in a van down by the river! (If Kerry wins in 04')

 

drummers ROCK!!!

 

You wanna know what's really frustrating? Only about 30 percent of people who COULD vote DO vote and that is for the national elections. For local elections, it is usually closer to 10 percent.

That means that if a presidential candidate gets 55 percent of the vote, fewer than 17 percent of registered voters just decided who will be the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet for the next four years.

17 freakin' percent. That is just pathetic.

 

WHOOOHOO, Go Kerry! actually I don't like Kerry that much but he'll do a better job than Bush.

 

I keep wondering how much it would take to get a one-day holiday for major elections. So many countries do this to encourage turn-out, and they get much better turn-out than we do. I've often thought those in power in the US want low voter turnout.

 

IIRC, that's about right for off-year congressionals, but I think the Presidential elections have been running closer to 50%. Still not good at all.

 

A new Los Angeles Times poll out this morning shows Bush trailing John Kerry, 51 to 44 percent, and that's even without Ralph Nader in the mix. Kerry still leads with Nader -- 48 to 42 percent with Nader drawing 4 percent.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/10/thu/index.html

 

Presidential elections:



Non-Presidential elections



Pathetic.

 

That is 50 percent VOTER TURNOUT. That means 50 percent of registered voters went to the polls. Most surveys that have been done estimate an average of 60 percent of eligible voters are registered to vote in a given election.

When I say 30 percent, I mean 30 percent of people who COULD vote (of the right age, no criminal record, etc), not just those who actually registered.

 

Look at the stunning dropoff after 1968. I really think the murder of Bobbie Kennedy, which had a gigantic effect on a public filled with optimism following LBJ's dropping out and RFK's stunning California victory, juxtaposed with his even more shocking murder that same night, the madness of the Democratic convention that year, and the defeat of an excellent candidate, Humphrey, by Nixon, who soon showed his true colors, produced a surge of cynicism towards politics from which this country has never recovered.

I remember the time well. It's really hard to describe just how enormously bewildered, upset and stunned the public was. There has never been a period in this country, in my memory, to compare to that stretch of a few years. Watergate was just the topper.

 

It's amazing that GWB gets high marks for the war on terrorism. Killing Arabs indiscriminately just makes for future terrorists.

But I guess it was easy to pump up Saddam Hussein as Evil Incarnate and worth the cost of countless billions of our money and hundreds of American lives and untold thousands of Iraqi civilians, when Iraq didn't even commit the 9/11 atrocity.

Nice sleight-of-hand.

Granted, many people are very busy and don't read much and have to work, take care of kids, this and that; and most important, the most important of all, people believe what they want to believe.

 

i agree with you. but no one, including you and people who agree with you on politics, is immune from that syndrome.

 

Originally posted by ROXTXIA
and most important, the most important of all, people believe what they want to believe.

Honestly, I often wish I didn't believe what I believe. Damnit, I never should have taken that red pill.

 

Or perhaps there are many people out there who don't agree with your views?

 

Got it. Thanks.

 

Economy Provides No Boost for Bush
Foreign Policy Concerns Hurt Approval Ratings

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page A01


The nation's economy is growing smartly, wages have begun to rise, and employers have added more than 1.4 million jobs to their payrolls in the past nine months. Yet voters continue to give President Bush poor ratings on his handling of the economy.

It may sound baffling, but interviews with voters, pollsters and economists suggest Bush's stubborn difficulties on domestic policy boil down to an obvious problem abroad.

"It all goes back to Iraq," said Steven Valerga, 50, a Republican in Martinez, Calif., who voted for Bush in 2000 but plans to vote for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) in November. "It's a drain on the economy, when there's so much needed elsewhere. My gosh, we didn't need to be there."

War has usually been good for the economy in the short run, and this one appears no different. In the first three months of this year, defense work accounted for nearly 16 percent of the nation's economic growth, according to the Commerce Department.

But amid the car bombings, assassinations and continuing casualties, voters are generally pessimistic about the direction the nation is taking. Bush's negative ratings are rising not just on the economy but also on energy policy, foreign affairs and his handling of the prescription drug issue. Voters fixated on Iraq so far are not willing to see the improving economy through a positive prism, according to pollsters and Bush campaign aides.

"There's a general anxiety that is at heart about security," said Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt, "and that's why security is so central to the campaign. Security underlies our feelings about prosperity."

Bush's ratings have not just been impervious to good economic news; they have fallen with it. In April 2003, 52 percent of voters approved of his handling of the economy, although at that time payrolls had not pulled out of a skid that began in March 2001.

By late May, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, the president's approval rating on the economy had slipped to 44 percent, with 54 percent disapproving. By then, virtually every economic indicator was heading skyward.

Conversations about the economy gravitate to foreign policy, and voters find the corrosive influence of war in the most unlikely places.

To Valerga, the fighting has driven up the cost of the plywood he needed to redo his roof. Clint Doherty, a small-business man in Clarkston, Wash., sees the war in stainless-steel bolts, which have risen in price by more than 120 percent in a month and a half. To Jeremy Tuck, 31, a Republican in Hamilton, Ala., standing by Bush, it has sucked taxpayer dollars away from where it is needed: "We're spending $150 billion on the war. That's what's hurting us."

For numerous voters, it is the nagging sense that a president consumed with foreign affairs no longer cares about the plight of citizens at home. Jodie Flickinger, 52, a lifelong Republican in Columbia, S.C., recalled being taken aback by economic conditions during a Memorial Day weekend trip to her native Youngstown, Ohio.

"I think he gets more joy, he gets a bigger rush, out of doing world war," she said of Bush. "The United States economy just bores him or confuses him, I guess."

Patricia Smith, 70, a Republican in Newport News, sensed the same problem: "He's gotten so overwhelmed with these other things that he's forgotten what he promised he would do for us."

Bush is not the first president to suffer from a disconnect between objective economic indicators and voter perceptions on the economy. The economy began growing steadily in March 1991, when President George H.W. Bush registered a 49 percent approval rating on his handling of the economy. But by July of 1992, those approval ratings had slid to an abysmal 25 percent, presaging his electoral defeat three months later.

By October 1994, economic growth had climbed to a healthy 4 percent, and unemployment had slid from 7.5 percent in 1992 to 6.1 percent. Yet President Bill Clinton's economic job approval ratings were stuck at 43 percent, with 52 percent disapproving. The GOP swept into power on Capitol Hill the next month. It was not until June 1996, more than five years into the longest peacetime economic expansion in history, that Clinton's approval ratings on the economy turned solidly positive.

"Americans are a show-me people," said Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute. "They need to be shown that things have actually been changed, and I think in an economic recovery, this means seeing the guy down the street getting his job back rather than good jobs numbers."

For President Bush, the disconnect has been far more pronounced. Over the course of this year, according to Gallup polling, disapproval of Bush's handling of the economy has risen in lock step with the economy's performance, from 43 percent in early January to 58 percent. "It may be hard to evince positive responses to anything we ask them," conceded Frank Newport, Gallup's polling director.

For Republicans, frustration is beginning to show. Last week, when the Labor Department announced that an additional 248,000 jobs had been created in May, House Ways and Means Committee Republicans e-mailed reporters, blaring, "It's a Booming Economy, Stupid."

But John R. Zaller, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggested that voters may not be stupid. They just may have considerably sharper antennae than economists.

In the fall of 2000, when most economic indicators continued to surge, anxiety among voters began to take a toll on Democrat Al Gore's White House bid, Zaller said. That anxiety proved to be prescient: By the spring of 2001, the economy had slipped into recession.

This go-round, jobs are coming back, but Americans may sense that those jobs are not of the same quality as the work that was lost, Newport said. Any good economic news is being tempered by high gasoline prices, and a generally sour mood has made voters skeptical.

"My dad told me when I was growing up that figures lie and liars figure," Flickinger scoffed.

For Bush, that sensitivity is compounded by the war in Iraq, Zaller said. Most economists and political scientists look to the economy to determine an election's outcome, but foreign policy events can knock or add as much 3 percentage points to an incumbent's vote. President Jimmy Carter may have been sunk in 1980 by the disastrous, failed rescue attempt of U.S. hostages in Iran.

For Bush, that sensitivity to foreign affairs is not all bad. Maria Sandoval, an elderly Democrat in Colorado Springs, has had a rough time of it in the past few years, living solely on Social Security and relying on the county clinic for her health care. On the economy, Bush "hasn't done very good," she allowed. He could have offered more help, she said, and his prescription drug law does not promise her much, either.

But Bush has her vote, she said firmly. "I guess he hasn't put too much into [the economy], but he's busy with a lot of other things. He's on top of everything. That's what I like about him."

During the Clinton years, Jeremy Tuck said he had been selling mobile homes in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and, at $45,000 a year, making good money. Last year, he was assembling mobile homes, earning $15,000 and living hand-to-mouth. But Bush has his vote this November. Had Gore been elected in 2000, Tuck said, "we would've been taken over by Saddam Hussein or [Osama] bin Laden."

"You make more money in plain terms when Democrats are in office," Tuck said with a shrug, "but Republicans are stronger on the military, and that's why I'm voting for President Bush."

 

I'm speechless.

 

Not fair of them to out bamaslamma's true identity like that.

 

Wow. Talk about living in fear either that or he has been watching WAY too much Faux News.


BRAINWASHED