Freedom Line Blog

In our latest Liberty Update, we highlight the benefits of the Trump Administration’s deregulation effort, both pre-pandemic and going forward, and how a budding effort among Congressional leftists to impose a moratorium on business mergers would severely undermine that effort.  Rasmussen Reports brings excellent news in that regard, as large majorities of Americans agree with Trump rather than hyper-regulatory leftists:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey shows that 58% of likely U.S. voters approve of Trump’s decision to temporarily limit government regulation of small businesses to help them bounce back.  Just 26% are opposed, while 17% are undecided.”

Sadly but perhaps predictably, those on the left stubbornly disagree:

The president’s action has triggered criticism from some.  While 70% of Republicans and 59% of voters not affiliated with either major party agree with the decision to temporarily limit government regulation of small businesses, just 44% of Democrats share that view.”

Nevertheless, this is welcome news, as Americans maintain faith in what gave us the strongest economy in human history when the coronavirus pandemic suddenly hit – deregulation and letting America’s free market forces work.

Somehow, it has escaped mainstream media attention that public satisfaction with America’s direction has jolted upward by almost 40%, from 26% to 36%, since January 2017:

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Right Track/Wrong Track Improves Dramatically Since January 2017

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Not exactly the post-presidency verdict that Barack Obama or leftists would have preferred, from USA Today:

Ouch

A very well-written report at the Huffington Post details how a few decisions by Gallup administrators caused the venerable polling company to miss key pockets of support for President Barack Obama in the run-up to last November’s presidential election.

Going into Election Day, Gallup had Mitt Romney leading Obama 49-48, but the actual result was 51-47. According to analysis by HuffPost, the reason for the bad call was because Gallup’s polling methods failed to keep up with how Americans are using their telephones.  This is potentially a huge problem because calling via telephone is the primary method for contacting people for public opinion polls.

Since the number of people screening calls by using unlisted landlines and/or cell phones has risen dramatically over the last few years, polling firms who fail to find a way around the barriers run the risk of missing large segments of voters who are avoiding unsolicited calls.

It just so happens that people using unlisted numbers only (i.e. not cell phones as well) planned to vote for Obama last year by a margin of 58 to 36 percent.  But because Gallup’s methodology didn’t correctly measure this subpopulation, the company never got a chance to put this data in their polls.  Consequently, Gallup’s opinion polls did not accurately reflect the intentions of the voting public which ultimately influenced who won the presidency.

Gallup is no stranger to embarrassing poll predictions.  The famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline from 1948 was based on polling data that stopped being collected two weeks before Election Day.  The thought was why keep polling if the predictions haven’t changed?  Of course, that decision didn’t account for the voters who broke late for Truman and made the false headline iconic.

Gallup rebounded from the fiasco to become arguably the world’s most reliable polling agency.  As the process of regaining that crown unfolds, this new breakdown is a good reminder to heed the words of the Gipper – “Trust, but verify” when it comes to public opinion polls.

Gallup is out with its new presidential polling numbers today. The results are dismal for President Obama. Only 16 states and the District of Columbia show the Commander-in-Chief with an approval rating over 50 percent.

Of course, we have to insert the normal caveats: we’re still more than a year away from the 2012 presidential election and it’s how Obama runs against his Republican opponent — not how he performs in a vacuum — that will determine his ultimate fate at the polls.

That being said, what’s most interesting about the new polls is their implications for next year’s electoral college. Crunching the numbers, RealClearPolitics’  Tom Bevan finds that the states giving Obama an approval rating of 51 % or higher have a total of 166 electoral votes between them; states at 49 % or lower have a total of 320 (270 are required to win a presidential election).

Digging deeper into the math only makes the picture more dismal for the White House. Bevan calculates that even adding states where Obama’s approval is at 49-50% (Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin, respectively) only gets him to 218 electoral votes — 52 shy of the total needed for victory.

Does this make Obama’s defeat inevitable? Not by a long shot. But it means that the president is in for a very steep climb over the next 15 months. Let the games begin.

Dig

It’s easy to attribute Obama’s poor approval ratings to generic anti-government sentiment and/or ongoing economic difficulty, citing Congress’s low approval as supporting evidence.  But a recent Rasmussen poll shows something interesting.  Namely, that the most conservative portion of our federal government receives the highest approval ratings from the public.  In fact, the number of respondents stating that the Supreme Court is doing a “good” or “excellent” job (35%) is approximately double the number who rate its performance as poor (18%).

Indeed, by a 31% to 26% margin, respondents believe the Supreme Court is too liberal, not too conservative.  Interesting insight for elected officials, and especially candidates, to ponder.

As President Obama and certain Members of Congress continue with their health care dog-and-pony show today, a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey is out confirming what should already be obvious to all politicians in Washington:  The health care bills under current consideration are about as popular as Congress itself.

As CNN reports it:

Twenty-five percent of people questioned in the poll say Congress should pass legislation similar to the bills passed by both chambers, with 48 percent saying lawmakers should work on an entirely new bill and a quarter saying Congress should stop all work on health care reform.”

In politics, those numbers amount to near universal opposition.   But we digress.