This is what happens to Democrats - even from red states like Montana - when they overtly and publicly shill for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries:
U.S. Sen. Max Baucus' approval rating dropped significantly this year over two years ago in a Montana State University Billings poll released Monday.
Just 44 percent of those polled approved of the job that the Montana Democrat is doing. Forty percent disapproved of the Montana Democrat's job performance.
That's a big difference from 2007, when more than 64 percent approved of his job performance.
To know how devastating this 20-point drop is, consider that the Associated Press notes that "approval ratings for U.S. Sen. on Tester, U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg and Gov. Brian Schweitzer did not change markedly in the poll." Put another way, even though the MSU-Billings poll can sometimes be unreliable, this drop for Baucus isn't part of some overall wave nor within any mathematical margin of error - Baucus took an explicit and explicitly big hit.
This was pretty predictable. Baucus didn't really make much of an effort to even pretend he was something other than a health insurance/pharmaceutical industry shill. And voters caught on.
STATE BLOGS
