Ed Gillespie, a former Bush strategist and one-time chairman of the Republican National Committee, made waves in certain circles on Sunday when he rolled out poll numbers showing independents massing against President Obama's $3.4 trillion budget.
Gillespie's figures, from a survey conducted by his new conservative strategy shop Resurgent Republic, show 56 percent of independents coming out against the president's budget and voters in general opposing it by 51 percent to 39 percent. The poll's methodology set off a flame war between Gillespie and Stan Greenberg, the founder of left-leaning Democracy Corps, after which Resurgent Republic is self-admittedly styled.
As Congress and the White House begin to wrangle over the details of the budget, the Resurgent Republic survey stands alone among a sea of polls that suggest just the opposite: Americans trust Obama on the economy and support his budget and recovery plan.
In an Associated Press-GfK poll conducted April 16-20, respondents favored increased spending in the budget by a margin of 49 percent to 43 percent. Just under half of respondents in the latest Diageo/Hotline poll agreed that the government needs to be more involved in stimulating the economy, with 44 percent calling it a bad idea. Independents were close, but leaned slightly towards favoring more government intervention. Respondents in the AP-GfK poll also said they trust congressional Democrats to handle the economy, 50 percent to 45 percent, while 65 percent disapprove of the job Republicans are doing.
That trust gap has been a persistent feature of economic polls in the last month. In an AllState/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll released April 23, 55 percent of respondents said they trusted Obama more to "develop solutions to the country's economic challenges," with just 26 percent preferring congressional Republicans.
Similarly, a Gallup poll released April 13 showed 71 percent of Americans having a great deal or fair amount of confidence in Obama to make the right choices on the economy, compared to 51 percent for the congressional Democratic leadership and 38 percent for congressional Republican leaders.
It might be tempting to chalk up this trust gap to the public's general disdain for Congress in poll after poll. But the April 13 Gallup poll also reports that, despite the high-profile anti-tax "tea parties" around the country, Americans have rarely been more pleased with the amount of federal income taxes they pay in polling going back to 1956.
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