United Liberty

We haven’t been paying attention to many general elections polls around here lately. Why? Because none of it really matters until around 60 days before voters casts their ballots. But there has been a narrative that Mitt Romney is performing poorly in swing states and President Barack Obama is well on his way to re-election. But a poll released by CNN earlier this week shows that Romney is up in the states that will decide the presidential election:

Mitt Romney has a sizeable lead in 15 battleground states, according to a CNN/ORC poll released late Monday.

The Republican candidate leads President Obama 51 percent to 43 in 15 states that will be critical in determining the outcome of the 2012 election.

Obama won 12 of these battleground states in 2008 — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — and will need to keep about half of those in 2012 if he’s to secure reelection. The poll also included Missouri, Indiana and Arizona as battleground states.

That’s good news for Romney, showing he has a base of support in those states, though the blanket poll of 534 registered voters doesn’t give an indication of which candidate leads in an individual state, or by how much.
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Obama holds a slim lead over Romney nationally in the CNN/ORC poll, 49 percent to 46, which is within the poll’s margin of error and unchanged from the same poll in May.

Before Rep. Michele Bachmann entered the race for the Republican nomination last year, the consensus was that was she would face a tough bid for re-election. Some evens speculated that her presidential bid was last hurrah. But Bachmann, who we haven’t covered since her exit from the GOP race, is indeed running for re-election, and the latest polling out of her district shows her with a small lead:

A new Democratic poll suggests Rep. Michele Bachmann could face a serious fight for reelection this fall, a finding sure to re-start the debate over whether the controversial Minnesota Republican can truly be beaten or whether she is simply the Democrats’ white whale.

In polling conducted by Anna Greenberg of Greenberg Quinlan Rosen Research Bachmann leads Minneapolis hotel magnate Jim Graves (D) 48 percent to 43 percent. A third (34 percent) of voters in the district rate her performance as “poor,” although 39 percent call it “excellent” or good.”

This poll will likely only embolden Democrats who would love, for largely symbolic reasons, to see Bachmann lose. Her outspoken conservatism, which was on full display during her 2012 presidential bid, has made her a enemy number one — or close to it — for many Democratic strategists and activists around the country.

With a contempt vote against Attorney General Eric Holder looming in the House of Representatives thanks to his failure to turn over documents related to the “Fast and Furious scandal, a new poll from The Hill shows that Americans believe President Barack Obama overreached last week by invoking “executive privilege”:

A clear majority of likely voters believes President Obama has exercised his executive power inappropriately — particularly in blocking the release of documents relating to “Operation Fast and Furious,” according to a new poll for The Hill.
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Obama last week invoked executive privilege to stop certain Justice Department documents relating to the botched “gun-walking” operation from being disclosed to the House Oversight and Government Reform committee.

The same panel, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), voted along party lines to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.

The Hill Poll found that likely voters disapproved by an almost 2-to-1 margin of Obama’s assertion of presidential power in the case. Overall, 56 percent of voters disapproved of his action, while only 29 percent approved.
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Sixty-one percent of independents said they disapproved of the president’s actions, and just 25 percent approved. Among Republicans, opposition to the president’s use of executive privilege was more entrenched at 78 percent.

Even 28 percent of Democrats, and 30 percent of self-identified liberals disapproved of Obama’s position.

Preparing for defeat at the Supreme Court over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the Obama Administration is looking at how they can implement parts of the law if only the individual mandate is struck down:

[T]he Obama administration will move ahead to implement major elements of the law if the individual coverage requirement is struck down, two senior Democrats told The Associated Press. One is a leading Democrat familiar with the administration’s thinking, the other a high-level Capitol Hill staffer. The two Democrats spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid appearing to be out of step with the administration’s public stance.

Because the law’s main coverage expansion does not begin until 2014, there would be time to try to fix serious problems that losing the individual coverage requirement may cause for the health insurance industry.

Surviving parts of the law would “absolutely” move ahead, said the congressional official. A Congress mired in partisan trench warfare would be unable to repeal or amend what’s left of the law, allowing the administration to advance. Much of the money for covering the uninsured was already provided in the law itself.

“Legislatively we can’t do a thing, and we are going to move full speed ahead (with implementation),” the official said.

With the impending decision on ObamaCare, the Left is already trying to knock the Supreme Court. For example, Juan Williams, a frequent contributor on Fox News, explained yesterday in The Hill that, if they do strike down ObamaCare, the Court will be betraying the trust of voters:

Every political strategist working the fall elections sees a game changer coming by the end of the month.

That’s when the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act.

The Democrats have a nuclear option in this political game if the high court throws out the healthcare law as unconstitutional.
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the heart of any attack on the Supreme Court for derailing healthcare reform will come from Obama.

After oral arguments at the Supreme Court, he signaled his willingness to target the court’s conservative majority during the presidential campaign. Obama told reporters that if the court overturns “a duly constituted and passed law,” the justices will be guilty of “judicial activism.” With words that sounded like a threat he added: “I’m pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step.”

The hardball political fact is that attacking the court will help the president’s campaign and it will damage the court for years to come.

A CBS News/New York Times poll released last week shows most Americans already believe the ruling on healthcare reform will be based on justices’ personal and political views. According to the survey, 55 percent of Americans believe the justices’ political ties will play a role in the healthcare decision.

As we get closer to a ruling from the Supreme Court over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), also known as ObamaCare, a recent poll from The New York Times and CBS News shows that Americans want to see President Barack Obama’s signature domestic law dismantled:

Forty-one percent of those surveyed said the court should strike down the entire law, and another 27 percent said the justices should overturn only the individual mandate, which requires most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty.

These numbers have not changed much in recent months and appeared to be largely unaffected by the more than six hours of arguments in the Supreme Court in March.

There was greater Republican opposition to the law than Democratic support. About two-thirds of Republicans in the recent survey said the entire law should be overturned, while 43 percent of Democrats said all of the law should be upheld.

More than 70 percent of independent voters said they wanted to see some or all of the law struck down, with a majority saying they hoped to see the whole law overturned. Twenty-two percent of independents said they hoped the entire law would survive.

All the cards are on the table today in Wisconsin as voters head to the polls, after millions of dollars in ads and endless canvassing by activists from both sides, to cast their ballot in the recall election between Gov. Scott Walker and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.

The recall, initiated as a response to reforms to the collective bargaining agreements with public-sector unions, has been somewhat of a headache for Wisconsin Democrats and labor unions. They’ve received little to no help from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Governors Association (DGA). And as a result of Walker’s reforms, labor unions have seen a sharp decrease in membership.

Democrats have been managing expectations in the race, indicating that they saw the writing on the wall that Walker would win, but a new poll from Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm that does polling for the Daily Kos, shows that the race may be closer than previously thought:

A Public Policy Polling survey released Monday shows Walker with the support of 50 percent of likely voters, ahead of Milwaukee Mayor Barrett at 47 percent.

But Walker’s support is down from a 50-to-45 percent edge in the same poll conducted three weeks ago and down from the 7-point 52-45 lead Walker held in a Marquette Law poll released last week.

When talking about so-called “social issues” in politics, the subjects of same-sex marriage and abortion are very frequently mentioned in the same breath.  The assumption goes like this – if someone is on the conservative side, that person will both favor banning gay marriage and banning abortion; if that person is on the liberal side, he will support gay marriage and abortion rights.  However, in reality there is no fundamental reason that the subjects need to be linked.  It is entirely possible, and in fact quite common, for someone to be okay with gays marrying but find abortion to be objectionable.

And in fact, the polls show this to be the exact direction that Americans are moving.  Most people now favor gay marriage rights, and the amount of Americans calling themselves “pro-choice” has shrunk while “pro-life” has gained share.  This fact should not be the least bit surprising to anyone who understands the issues at hand.  Gay marriage will naturally become more popular because it is a message of inclusion; the arguments against it are weak and becoming weaker as more people realize it will not hurt them in any way.  And as for abortion, improved medical imaging, the survival of fetuses at increasingly earlier stages, and wider acceptance of contraception has rendered abortion less necessary and more morally questionable.

With a little over a week to go until the recall election in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, who has been targeted and unfairly maligned by labor unions over reasonable measures pushed to limit collective bargaining, is leading his Democratic opponent, Tom Barrett, by a solid margin:

Embattled Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) got more encouraging news Thursday with a new poll showing him continuing to hold a sizable lead ahead of his June 5 recall election.

Walker leads his Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, 50-42 percent among likely voters, according to a Reason-Rupe poll released Thursday.

That’s an improvement for Walker over the six-point lead he posted in a Marquette poll last week, and further evidence that the incumbent governor seems likely to stave off his recall challenge.
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[T]he poll showed that Wisconsin voters might be wary of union efforts. Only 35 percent of respondents said they had a favorable opinion of public-sector unions, versus 31 percent who said they had an unfavorable opinion. More than half of those surveyed also signaled support for increasing the amounts government employees contributed to their healthcare and pensions.

The poll found that 44 percent said public employee unions have too much power in negotiating their contracts, and a plurality said public-sector unions have done more to hurt than help local economies.

President Barack Obama’s recent support of gay marriage, an issue where his opinion has “evolved,” has been statistically insignificant in the polls, which you could take as a statement from voters that they aren’t overly concerned with the issue in the upcoming election with everything else going on in the country:

Several weeks after President Obama‘s completed “evolution” on gay marriage, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, to be released later today, shows that the announcement seems to have had very little effect on voters.

NBC reports that the poll shows a combined 17 percent say the president’s announcement makes them “much more likely” or “somewhat more likely” to vote for him in November. That’s compared with a combined 20 percent who say they are now more likely to vote for staunchly anti-gay marriage Republican Mitt Romney.

The NBC report continues: “Perhaps more importantly, 62 percent say the president’s support for gay marriage doesn’t make a difference in their vote — including 75 percent of independents, 76 percent of moderates, 81 percent of African Americans, and 65 percent of residents in the Midwest.”

The poll also reportedly finds that 54 percent of Americans would support a state law legalizing same-sex marriage. A combined 40 percent say they would oppose such a law.