As part of our weekly poll, we include a monthly rotating question that allows us to gauge trends on a handful of key issues. One question asks about gay marriage, another about immigration reform, the third about corporate greed, and the final one about, appropriately enough, jobs versus the deficit. Now that we've been in the field for over half a year, we can take a meaningful look at that last question to see how attitudes have evolved.
Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos/SEIU (7/28-31, registered voters, monthly trendlines):
Q: Which do you think should be a higher priority for the government: creating jobs or cutting the deficit?
When we inaugurated this question in January, "jobs" won out over "deficit" by a wide 60-34 margin, a spread of 26 points. Since that time, the margin has steadily eroded and now American voters favor jobs by just 12 points, 52-40.
So I'm wondering if what we're seeing here is anything similar to the phenomenon we experienced during the health care debate in 2009. Before health care reform got cranked up on Capitol Hill, it generally polled quite well. But once Republicans started attacking the idea with great savagery, poll numbers for health care reform dwindled until it became yet another purely partisan issue.
Here, it's not so much that the idea of job creation has been attacked (though certainly Republicans are openly scornful of the notion that government can, in fact, spur job creation). Rather, it's more that jobs have been forgotten, and the deficit has taken center stage. And that seems to be reflected in public attitudes about which ought to be a higher priority.
Of course, the idea that these two concepts are mutually exclusive is one of the most insidious developments in our discourse in recent years—what better way to reduce the deficit than to reduce unemployment? I'm not going to say there's any silver lining to that Satan Sandwich. But perhaps now—now—we can finally start talking about jobs.