Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Eleven Percent Is Plenty

CBS News polling in the days just before passage of health care legislation reveals that Nancy Pelosi has an 11% favorability rating and a 37% unfavorability rating. Harry Reid is at 8% and 23%. And that's just fine.

Ordinary folks don't have strong feelings about Pelosi or Reid -- a majority of the people surveyed didn't offer an opinion, and I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of them didn't even know who Pelosi and Reid were. If you know who they are and have strong feelings, your vote is probably overdetermined anyway. I spread the Gospel of Pelositheism not for tuned-out swing voters, but for you the knowledgeable progressive blog-reader.

Everybody knows who Barack Obama is. And he's managed to maintain a net positive approval rating even at the bottom of a deep recession. This fall I expect Republicans to spend a fair amount of money on attempts to get swing voters thinking of their representative in relation to Pelosi and Reid instead of Obama. It'll fail.

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