Bad news for Team Willard on Wednesday. In addition to a new Bloomberg poll that showed Obama with a 13-point lead, there was this interesting tidbit.
A plurality of Americans now say they are better off than they were when President Barack Obama was inaugurated, providing a surprising lift to Obama’s re- election campaign despite troublesome economic news.
Forty-five percent of those surveyed in a Bloomberg National Poll say they are better off than at the beginning of 2009 compared with 36 percent who say they are worse off. In March, poll respondents split almost evenly on that question after having been decidedly negative since the aftermath of the worst recession in seven decades.
And that's a big problem for Willard, who's been channelling Reagan lately.
But it's not just that the economy is better than it was four years ago. People just don't like what Willard is saying about what he's going to do with the next four years.
Even with the run of bad reports, Americans say they prefer Obama’s economic vision to that of his presumptive Republican rival, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, by a margin of 49 percent to 33 percent. That finding reflects a 7-percentage- point gain for Obama since March and an equal loss for his opponent, identified then as “Republicans” and in this survey as Romney.
“You don’t just trust the private sector to do the right thing,” says Chris Howell, 23, who works at a nonprofit organization in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Obama’s policies are better suited to providing “long-term solutions” for the economy’s problems, he added.
Surely, the Willard campaign knows that Americans don't believe more tax cuts for rich people will magically turn the economy around. And seeing as how that's kinda Willard's entire recovery plan, that's a problem. So, what they'll have to do is run an almost entirely negative campaign against the president -- all the while complaining that he's the one that's going negative.
Fun times.
