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May 9, 2004
More on Economic Pessimism
On Friday, I pointed out that the good jobs report for April seemed unlikely to turn voters' negative views of Bush's economic management around. Here's some more evidence supporting that judgement.
First, note that both the new ARG poll and the new AP poll have Bush's approval rating on the economy down to the lowest levels recorded by these polls (38 percent and 43 percent, respectively). Guess voters haven't yet absorbed the good news about how the economy is "strong and getting stronger" and about how "tax relief is working".
And here's a result from the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that crisply captures voters' current economic pessimism and the difficulties Bush is going to have turning that pessimism around. By 2:1 (60/31) voters agree that "On the basis of what I see for the future, the signs point to an economy that is going to be in trouble--jobs are moving overseas, the budget deficit is growing, and too many jobs do not have health insurance or pensions.", rather than "On the basis of what I see for the future, the signs point to an economy that is going to be strong--jobs are being created, inflation is low, and the stock market is up".
Clearly, voters' economic pessimism is deeply-rooted in a wide range of economic problems that have uniformly gotten worse on Bush's watch. And it's not likely to go away because we've finally got some good monthly job numbers. In the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo, he's still "got a lot of 'splainin' to do".
Posted by Ruy Teixeira at 12:58 AM | link
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