Poll: Majority of Republicans welcome a shutdown

By Sahil Kapur

WASHINGTON – A Gallup poll released Wednesday and circulated by Senate Democrats found that Americans decidedly want to see the two parties compromise and reach a budget deal. But a majority of Republicans wanted their leaders to "[h]old out for the basic budget plan they want, even if that means the government shuts down."

Americans decidedly want a compromise by a margin of 58 to 33 percent, the poll found. But Republicans prefer the hard line position 51 to 44 percent, in contrast with Democrats, who are willing to cede ground by a margin of 68 to 27 percent.

Independents in the survey said they support the compromise position by 60 to 29 percent.

The survey sheds light on how the blame game might play out as a government shutdown appears virtually inevitable. A late-night meeting Wednesday between President Barack Obama, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) failed to produce an accord between the two parties, and even if a deal is struck in time, procedural rules would prevent it from being enacted by Friday to avert a temporary closure of services.

The Gallup poll found that, by a margin of 41 to 34 percent, Americans believe that Obama and Congressional Democrats are "doing the better job" as compared to Congressional Republicans in trying to strike a deal. That's up from February, when Republicans had the edge 42 to 39 percent.

If the most recent government shutdown, which occurred in 1995 as Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) stared down President Bill Clinton, is any indication, Congress will be blamed for the failure to reach a deal while the president's favorable ratings will rise.

This time, the Republican speaker isn't pushing for a confrontation. But unlike Obama and Reid, Boehner is boxed in by a group of tea partiers who may be unwilling to accept any deal agreeable to Democrats.

As Gallup put it, "The difficulty for House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders is that rank-and-file Republicans' views on this question are starkly different from those of the public at large."

The Gallup survey polled 1,014 American adults across the nation on April 5, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Fox Reverses Results Of Gallup Poll To Claim Americans Oppose Union Collective Bargaining Rights

By Zaid Jilani

Yesterday, USA Today and Gallup released a new poll that found that a whopping 61 percent of Americansoppose efforts like those of Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) to strip public sector unions of collective bargaining rights. The poll also found that only a third of Americans support such a policy, indicating that Walker is pandering to the far-right of the American electorate and is hardly representative of mainstream political thought in this country.

This morning, during a debate about the situation in Wisconsin and collective bargaining rights in general, the Fox News show Fox & Friends referenced the USA Today/Gallup poll. With incredible brazenness, the Fox hosts actually reversed the results of the poll in order to claim that two-thirds of Americans supported Wisconsin-style laws rather than opposed them.

During the discussion, Fox host Brian Kilmeade asked pro-labor guest Robert Zimmerman if President Obama was taking a “big risk” by opposing Walker’s law. Zimmerman responded by saying that Obama was speaking “for the mainstream of our country, and the mainstream of Republican governors who are not siding with Governor Walker.” Kilmeade responded by saying, “I think Gallup, a relatively mainstream poll, has a differing view. And here’s the question that was posed. Do you favor or disfavor of taking away collective bargaining when it comes to salaries for government workers. 66 percent in favor, 33 percent opposed, 9 percent up in the air.” Watch it:

Needless to say, it is hardly “fair and balanced,” as Fox News likes to deem itself, to take the results of a poll and simply reverse them when they do not go your way.

It’s worth pointing out that, Jim Glassman, the Bush Center director who appeared on the show to argue against collective bargaining, said right after the poll was shown that “many” states actually don’t have collective bargaining. The truth is that only five states do not have collective bargaining for public employees — Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Those states rank 45th, 48th, 49th, 38th, and 34th, in average SAT scores, respectively. Wisconsin is 3rd.

UPDATEIn the final minute of the Fox & Friends episode, Kilmeade issued a correction and made an apology for reversing the numbers.

UPDATEYesterday, scores of New York City residents protested outside of the Fox News headquarters about the network's coverage of the Wisconsin protests, timing their protests to coincide with the 5 pm start of Glenn Beck's show. One protester carried a sign that appropriately read "Fox Lies":

Poll: Tea Party Supporters And Republican Base Are Virtually ‘Indistinguishable,’ Share Similar Ideologies

William Tomasko

Members of the Republican establishment are fond of treating the Tea Party as an original, organic political phenomenon that is separate from the GOP. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed from February, Karl Rove hailed how the movement “arose spontaneously” and “made an important splash” while warning that the Tea Party and the GOP “are, and should remain, distinct from one another” because “the sum would be less than the parts.” Similarly, early this year, a prominent Tea Party organizer insisted, “We must not allow the Tea Parties and other patriotic grassroots movement to be hijacked by the GOP.”

However, a new Gallup poll illuminates how the Tea Party and the GOP are already closely related because they share virtually the exact same priorities:

The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.

As a result, Tea Party supporters’ issue concerns are not decidedly different from those of Republican identifiers. The two groups differ only slightly in their views of federal government debt and the size and power of the federal government among the 10 issues tested.

Both Tea Party supporters and Republicans identified the same top three “extremely serious threats” to the U.S. future, and in the same order: “federal government debt,” “terrorism,” and “the size and power of the federal government.” On all 10 issues mentioned by Gallup, the average gap between the Tea Party level of concern and the Republican level of concern was only 3.2 percent. Gallup has also found that 79 percent of Tea Party supporters identify as Republicans, as opposed to only 44 percent of the general population, leading Gallup to suggest that “the Tea Party movement is more a rebranding of core Republicanism than a new or distinct entity on the American political scene.”

As Greg Sargent argues at the Plum Line, “The Tea Party movement gets a disproportionate share of media attention because of all the funny costumes, Hitler references, and fantasizing about armed revolution. But it’s hard to see what’s distinctive about the Tea Partiers’ actual political views and priorities.”