Let’s Use The Majority This Time
Based on Scott Rasmussen’s generic ballot polling, it’s looking fairly likely that Republicans will retake the majority in the House. I’d still put retaking the Senate as a longshot but still achievable. Here’s what Rasmussen’s generic ballot polling shows:
Republican candidates now have an eight-point lead over Democrats, their biggest lead of the year, in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.
The new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 44% would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate while 36% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent. Support for GOP candidates held steady over the past week, but support for Democrats slipped by a point.
That 8-point gap represents a 17 point swing this year. Democrats started the year with a 9-point gap on the generic ballot question. The 8-point gap represents the Republicans’ biggest gap in years.
The Democrats’ passing health care legislation won’t be forgotten, especially if it triggers a new round of layoffs and when it triggers higher taxes.
Groups representing smaller businesses say the threat of increased taxes and premiums could outweigh provisions intended to limit the impact on small employers. The Senate bill “will not only fail to reduce and control the constantly climbing health-care costs small-business owners face, but it will result in new and greater costs on their business,” said Dan Danner, head of the National Federation of Independent Business.
This legislation is about controlling people. Improving health care has nothing to do with it. Last week, when I interviewed Rep. Thad McCotter, I asked him how much the health care debate was hurting the economy. I prefaced the question by saying that labor cost uncertainty was causing businesses to not hire. His response was interesting, saying that it wasn’t just uncertainty driving business’s hiring hesitancy but also the worry that labor costs would be too high as a result of the Democrats’ health care legislation.
One of the campaign themes the GOP should employ is that the Democrats’ moderates all voted for bigger government rather than represent their constituents. That plays into this Rasmussen polling:
Sixty-six percent (66%) of U.S. voters prefer a smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes over a more active government with more services and higher taxes. That’s the second highest finding of the year: In August at the height of the congressional town hall controversies over the health care plan, 70% felt that way.
Finally, Republicans should jump all over this opportunity:
Greg Sargent of The Plum Line has an interesting bit of strategy from Senate Democrats on how they’ll play healthcare reform in 2010. They want to force Republicans to say whether they support a full repeal of the bill, assuming it has passed.
“Republicans on the ballot next November who opposed the bill will be in the precarious position of telling voters they plan to rollback landmark health care reform which will have afforded coverage to hundreds of thousands in their state,” DSCC spokesman Eric Schultz emails.
“We absolutely intend to make Republicans look voters in the eye next November and make it clear they want to take affordable health care reform away from them,” Schultz continues, adding that they intend to press the case that “if it was worth filibustering” to Republicans, then surely it’s “worth repealing.”
I’d love hearing Democrats defend their votes to raise taxes, increase health insurance premiums and exploding the deficit while turning America’s health care system into a third world system.
Let’s ask them on the campaign trail why their so-called moderates voted just like self-described Socialist Bernie Sanders and such noted out-of-touch liberals as John Kerry, Babs Boxer and Chuck Schumer. Let’s emphasize the fact that there is no such thing as a true Democratic moderate, that there’s only people that sound like moderates until they morph into spineless wimps.
When we regain the majority in the House, then it’s time we started pressuring the remaining socialists in the Senate and that we started putting pressure on President Obama. If they think that their health care plan is so good, fine, let’s force them to defend it.
Finally, it’s time the Senate leadership actually got a few ruthless leaders. I’ve had enough of seeing Mitch McConnell getting rolled by a wimp like Harry Reid. What we need is a leader that won’t hesitate to put the pressure on Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin. In fact, we need someone who’d relish the day-to-day battle with these idiots.
Welcome to the revolution.
Technorati Tags: Polling, Generic Ballot, Republicans, Campaigning, House, Senate, Mitch McConnell, Republicans, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Socialists, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Moderates, Election 2010
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:50 pm
This monstrosity of a bill is like the spawn of some demonic Greek god and an animal - inhuman, evil, and insidious - deserving of a hero to slay.
When a private citizen gives favors to a Senator in exchange for his vote, it’s called “bribery.” When a President or a Senate Majority Leader does it, it’s called “artful politics”, “compromise” or “logrolling.”
Political Economics has shown us many years ago that logrolling can lead to a slate of proposals being passed, each portion of which would fail under majority vote. The deals offered to Landrieu, Nelson, and Sanders is not only nefarious, it’s likely a violation of Equal Protection. But when Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is considered merely a trifle, what other part of the Constitution bears any relevance?
Obama has broken every promise he made with this bill to liberals, conservatives, and the nation: no public option, funding for abortion, not deficit neutral, Medicare cuts, mandates and fines, higher insurance premiums, no universal coverage, etc. etc. ad nauseum. Please assure me so that I may sleep well on Christmas Eve that the electorate will remember all these broken promises next November? If you’re not sure, lie to me please.
Frankly, if Obama had passed a single-payer system it would be less devastating than this scrapbook of political backroom deals and dusty old proposals. We will bear all of the costs of higher premiums, rationed care, insolvent Medicare, disappearance of private insurance, lack of transparency, lack of privacy, higher taxes, higher deficits and get NONE of the benefits of universal health care. It’s the worst of all possible outcomes. It could not destroy our health care system better if it were intended to do so.
December 24th, 2009 at 9:07 am
How about this for a campaign promise?
“If elected, I swear to God above that I WILL NOT govern like a democrat…(like republicans have done for the last ten years)”.
December 25th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I can’t say that Duh-1 has broken his promise to get rid of “business as usual” in D.C. - he has taken it to a completely new, unseen-in-history height of nefarious and secret attacks against the political and economic systems that made this country great in the first place.
Which is probably why he has done it. He couldn’t stand the thought that maybe, just maybe, this country, with all its warts and problems, is still better than anything conceived before, and certainly better than he will leave it.
And BTW, when will someone start challenging the liar donks on their “affordable health care” meme? Costing more is “affordable?” If that’s the case, I should have been charging a lot more for the products my company had, just to make them “affordable”.
December 25th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Hear Hear! Again where is gods name is the Republican party. What do they think, 2010 is a slam dunk? That all they have to do is let Fox news carry their water?
Why aren’t they pounding the dems everyday, calling them on their bullshit lies and deception hard fast and often? Why?
Because they are them, and we are us.