On the weekends, my usual perch here at Daily Kos is manning the
weekend digest for Daily Kos Elections. In its traditional position on Saturday evenings, you can find all of the campaign polling for the previous week.
This week, as I noted last night, national horse-race polling was a bit harder to come by, in part because the debt ceiling deal between the president and Congressional Republicans became the dominant story in our political conversation. Thus, the Obama-Romney or Obama-Bachmann talk this week was substituted by an assessment of public sentiments towards the deal.
Right from the jump, there was a pretty contentious debate among Democrats about the merits of the deal. It played out on the pages here at Daily Kos, as well as across the left-of-center blogosphere. Many of the more prominent voices in these parts were critical of the deal (two solid examples of which can be found here and here).
CNN/Opinion Research posted the first reactions to the deal, courtesy of a one-day sampling conducted on Monday. The verdict was that the reaction to the debt ceiling deal was decidedly mixed (44 percent approval, 52 percent disapproval).
But the stat that many in the traditional media, and more still on Twitter, fixated on was the party breakdown of support for the deal. Democrats were the most satisfied with the deal, according to the CNN Poll:
Approve/Disapprove of the Debt Ceiling deal, by party
Democrats: 63/32
Independents: 35/62
Republicans: 35/58
A poll immediately on the heels of the CNN poll, this time from Gallup, echoed similar sentiments. Gallup also broke the deal approval by ideology, and found liberals (51 percent) twice as likely to express support for the deal than conservatives (25 percent).
A subsequent poll on the subject by CBS and the New York Times was not nearly as stark in the variation between the parties as CNN or Gallup. Nevertheless, the CBS/NYT data found Democrats considerably more inclined (49/44 support) to approve of the deal than Republicans (42/52).
This trio of polls on the debt ceiling deal, amid prominent criticism from voices on the left, fed into a familiar meme: The "professional left" and their critiques of the debt deal don't square with what "real Democrats" are thinking.
No less than the Democratic National Committee offered this assessment, though their analysis was more pointed to the discussion of whether the GOP were "winners" in the debt ceiling deal rather than any critique pointed at liberal critics in the blogosphere:
Certainly the conventional wisdom was that the Republicans won and the Democrats lost and Republicans partisans would be euphoric while Democratic partisans would be in the dumps. Fortunately, we don’t have to depend only on the rush to judgment of a small cadre of Washington-based pundits and activists making their assessments off of one-sided leaks and spin – there is a thing called public opinion that we can look to for a more accurate portrayal. The fact is, since President Obama reached a debt and deficit compromise with Republicans over the weekend, CNN and Gallup polls show that a hefty majority of Democrats and Liberals support the deal while a hefty majority of Republicans, and particularly the all-important Tea Party Republicans, oppose it. If you’re waiting for the rush of stories, columns and blogs with the inside the beltway intelligentsia admitting they missed the mark on this – don’t hold your breath. The very folks who rush to judgment on these things are rarely in a rush to admit they were wrong.
Given the polling disparities, is there something to this line of argument?
For two reasons, I am a bit skeptical:
1) This line of argument, I believe, makes a fundamentally errant assumption. It presumes that "support" for the deal equates to "support" for the actual details of the deal. A simpler, and an inherently more logical explanation, is that Democrats support the deal in greater numbers for one reason: They were the only one of those three groups tremendously eager to see a deal made in the first place.
2) Furthermore, to presume that Democratic support for the deal is an endorsement of its particulars is to ignore substantial data in the very polls that the various journos (and the DNC) were flogging. All three of those polls had data points that showed substantial support for debt deal elements that wound up quite pointedly not being part of the final bargain.
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One of the things that inherently gave the Republicans a stronger negotiating hand in the debt ceiling fracas was the fact that a huge part of their caucus seemed very much not to care if a deal was made. In fact, it was commonplace to see prominent Republican voices, including several who served in Congress, talking about default like it was not only an option, but a preferable one.
That sentiment was echoed by the GOP faithful. In a July poll conducted by CNN/ORC, a majority of conservatives (53 percent) felt that a default on the debt would either cause "minor problems" or "no problems at all."
By contrast, 77 percent of liberals and 70 percent of moderates believed that a default would either generate a "crisis" or at a minimum create "major problems."
This goes a long way toward explaining this week's polling. The fact that a large number of Republicans considered a deal of any kind on the debt ceiling to be anathema to their cause had tremendous impact on the polling numbers, if only because there was no deal these folks would approve. In this case, the details became irrelevant, and the fact that John Boehner claims that he got "98 percent of what [he] wanted" out of the deal becomes irrelevant, as well.
It works both ways, of course. Democratic support of the deal is being misinterpreted in many corners as support for the details of the deal. In reality, it is probably better understood as an expression of relief that an event that the overwhelming majority of Democrats perceived (accurately) as a dangerous situation was averted.
To conflate support for the detail with support for its actual details is confounded by the very same polls that show Democrats demonstrably more inclined to support the debt ceiling package.
Consider the aforementioned CBS/NYT poll. Those same Democratic voters who offered net approval for the deal believed, by a 67-27 margin, that the debt ceiling deal should have included increases in tax revenue and not just spending cuts.
The one-day CNN poll was even more blunt in its assessment: by a 23-77 margin among Democrats (and an even more lopsided 20-80 ratio among liberals), voters disapproved of the lack of revenue increases in the debt ceiling deal. In that same survey, a majority both liberals and Democrats felt that the Democrats and the president "gave up too much" in order to make the deal happen. In a telling dichotomy, only 34 percent of conservatives felt that the GOP "gave up too much."
The post-deal numbers on revenue-versus-cuts tracked virtually all of pre-deal polling, which favored a "balanced approach" to attacking the debt as opposed to a cuts-only proposal.
Thus, it is difficult not to conclude that the details of the debt ceiling deal are not necessarily popular, even as Democrats tend to support the deal.
The political fallout from the debt ceiling deal will still take weeks, if not months, to shake out. If the data has good news for Democrats, it is the fact that a consistent finding (both pre-deal and post-deal) is that the GOP's brand name took quite the beating from the protracted fight. The CBS/NYT poll found that 47 percent of voters were more inclined to trust the president on the economy, as opposed to just 33 percent who favored the Republican approach. That 14-point gap is quite a bit wider than what was seen before this whole process kicked off. What's more, even as the president's job approval has hit the skids a bit, public esteem for the GOP Congress has fallen at an even more sharp rate.
To close with a bit of a shopworn phrase, there were "no winners" in the debt ceiling fight. But in the long term, the Democrats may emerge less bludgeoned by this than the GOP. But no one should interpret that as a round of applause from Democrats over what transpired this week. The biggest win for Democrats is not the deal itself, which is not popular and seems unlikely to become more so as the repercussions of it become felt. The sole element of Democratic "victory" here may prove to be that, with everyone watching, the Republican agenda was laid bare for the nation to see. And the nation does not appear to be pleased with what they saw.
It is a small victory, but a very real one.