This Friday morning I participated in a briefing with pollster Stan Greenberg and Campaign for America's Future co-director Robert Borosage, based on an election post-mortem poll done by Greenberg's firm, Greenberg Quinlin Rosner, which Greenberg has been doing every election since 1996. I wrote about this earlier in my diary, "Progressive polling post-mortem from Stan Greenberg & Robert Borosage". Now I want to take a narrower look, specifically at questions that deal with how people see the state of the country and the challenges ahead, and how well the Democrats could have or did reach them.
The first slide shows strong support for three narratives, about the country being in decline, "while countries like China have a vision to succeed," about "entrenched special interests that finance both parties' campaigns," and about politicians "pursuing their own party's agenda - ignoring the needs of regular citizens and the country." The first narrative is relatively rare as a message in the elite media, and is generally bad for conservatives, the second two are increasingly more common, and tend mask a fairly significant asymmetry between the two parties.
[Click to Enlarge in New Window]
The second slide shows only slightly lower levels of support for three more narratives: that middle class families played by the rules, and got screwed, while Wall Street, big banks & CEOs destroyed the economy and got bailed, that America's prosperity was built on a growing middle class that's now in decline, while the government serves CEOs instead, and that "Politicians have spent the country into bankruptcy." The first two narratives are relatively rare in elite media, and damaging to conservative ideology, while the third is fairly omnipresent in elite media, and quite useful for conservative elites, even though they are responsible for the vast majority of the debt:
[Click to Enlarge in New Window]
Collectively, these views represent a fairly substantial net potential advantage for liberals and Democrats, if they chose to mobilize and message based upon four of these six narratives. Inaction, however, allows two of them to be used against liberals and Democrats (post-partisanship & the debt), even if conservatives & Republicans are actually the ones responsible for the problems identified.
|
