Who Wins and Who Loses in Debt Battle

Nate Silver published an informative article recently entitled "Surveying the Electoral Damage of the Debt Debate" that should be required reading for anyone who is interested in about the political landscape following the debt "crisis."

While I understand that a lot of people are more worried about whether their social security and Medicare will be cut than about who wins and who loses in the end, there are a large amount of politicos out there who eat, sleep, and breathe polling data and statistical analysis.

The most notable analysis was in regards to the 2012 election cycle.

FiveThirtyEight

Since Congress’s approval rating is now extremely low, 2012 could be another high-volatility cycle. There are 93 first-term members of the current House (78 of whom are Republicans). Next year could match or exceed that threshold, especially given redistricting, which could be responsible for another 20 or so incumbents either losing or retiring above and beyond the impact of the overall political climate.

What’s less clear is how the losses might be distributed between the parties. An anti-Republican wave is plausible, but so is an anti-incumbent one. The election of 2012 could resemble that of another redistricting year, 1992, in which there were a remarkable 110 first-term members of Congress elected, but in which the losses were split fairly evenly between the parties. (Democrats lost a net of 9 seats in the House despite winning the presidency.)

One thing that is for sure? Congressional Republicans are in trouble:

In other words, I think we’re seeing a lot of caution lights for the Republicans — but not yet any red flags. The nearest thing to an exception is probably this: the recent CNN poll that finds that 58 percent of voters think the policies proposed by Republicans in Congress would take the country in the wrong direction. Not only is that figure up significantly from where it was when CNN last polled it in January (when it stood at 50 percent). It’s also by some margin the worst rating that CNN has found for either party since they began polling on the question in 1994.

Read the whole article here.

FiveThirtyEight: G.O.P. No Tax Stance is Oustide Political Mainstream

Nate Silver published an extremely interesting article yesterday about how the G.O.P.’s fervent no-tax policy is outside of the political mainstream.

He cites Gallup most recent poll (posted below), and the results are fairly surprising compared to those of the Tea Party poll that the Washington Post did:

Preferences for Spending Cuts vs. Tax Increases to Reduce the Deficit

As you may know, Congress can reduce the federal budget deficit by cutting spending, raising taxes, or a combination of the two. Ideally, how would you prefer to see Congress attempt to reduce the federal budget deficit?      

Only with spending cuts	20%
Mostly with spending cuts	30%
Equally with spending cuts and tax increases	32%
Mostly with tax increases	7%
Only with tax increases	4%
Total: Only/Mostly with spending cuts	50%
Total: Only/Mostly with tax increases	11%

[Gallup, 7/13/2011]

While Republican in the House are vehemently defending a spending-cuts-only debt ceiling deal, Gallup’s poll shows that this is actually outside the mainstream of the American public. Only 26% of Republican voters surveyed took the position that a deal should be 100% spending cuts, along with 20% of those polled overall. In fact, where the most popular answer (at 32%) was that any deal should utilize spending cuts and tax increases equally.

Additionally, Republican congressmen (largely through their leaders, Eric Cantor and John Boehner), have been vastly overstating the amount of tax increases that President Obama’s debt ceiling idea would include. The Obama plan would include 83% spending cuts to 17% tax increases/the elimination of tax loopholes.

Nate Silver explained it best in his article:

We can also use the Gallup poll to tease out what mix of tax increases and spending cuts the public would like to see in a deal. Assume that the people who told Gallup that they wanted “mostly” cuts would prefer a 3-to-1 ratio of spending reductions to tax increases, and that those who said they wanted mostly tax increases would prefer a 3-to-1 ratio in the opposite direction. (The other choices that Gallup provided in the poll — an equal mix of tax increases and spending cuts or a deal that consisted entirely of one or the other — are straightforward to interpret.)

The average Republican voter, based on this data, wants a mix of 26 percent tax increases to 74 percent spending cuts. The average independent voter prefers a 34-to-66 mix, while the average Democratic voter wants a 46-to-54 mix.

Now consider the positions of the respective parties to the negotiation. One framework that President Obama has offered, which would reduce the debt by a reported $2 trillion, contains a mix of about 17 percent tax increases to 83 percent spending cuts.

Check out the whole article here, or click the link below:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/house-republicans-no-tax-stance-far-outside-political-mainstream/