Hard to believe that little over a week ago, when we were deciding which questions to ask in our weekly poll, Mitt Romney looked like he was about to cruise to the GOP nomination. But if you put yourself back in that not-so-wild and only slightly crazy era, you can understand why we focused heavily on Romney in our slate of rotating questions. He may yet win (who knows?), but if he does, he certainly won't like the answers we got back.
Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos & SEIU. 1/19-22. Registered voters. MoE ±3.1% (no trendlines):
Q: Which of the following statements do you agree with more: 'Mitt Romney has strong principles' or 'Mitt Romney will say anything he has to to get elected'?
Has strong principles: 26
Will say anything: 61
Unsure: 12
Well, this one speaks for itself, doesn't it? I wish we'd had room to ask the same questions about Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama, but I'd be surprised if their "will say anything" scores are as high. (Well, Newt will certainly say any damn thing that comes to his mind... just most of it doesn't help him to get elected.)
Now, I know you remember this:
Said Mitt (infamously):
Corporations are people, my friend.
So we asked:
Q: Do you think that corporations should have the same rights as people, or not?
Should have the same rights: 24
Should not have: 56
Unsure: 20
No, my friend, it looks like they should not. Unsurprisingly, Republicans are most likely to support people-hood for corporations, but even a plurality of them (41%) don't like the idea. By the way, Romney did it again just yesterday:
“Now, the banks aren’t bad people,” Romney said. “They’re just overwhelmed right now. They’re overwhelmed with a lot of things. One is a lot of homes coming in right now that are in foreclosure or in trouble and the other is with a massive new pile of regulations.”
Oy! But that's hardly the worst of it. Romney's certainly gotten himself into a world of trouble thanks to this:
“It’s probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything,” Mr. Romney said. “Because my last 10 years, I’ve—my income comes overwhelmingly from some investments made in the past, whether ordinary income or earned annually. I got a little bit of income from my book, but I gave that all away. And then I get speaker’s fees from time to time, but not very much.”
That "not very much"—amazingly only the second-worst self-inflicted wound in this statement—turned out to be $374,327. (At least, last week it did. With Romney's recent tax returns now public, the figure is actually more like half a million bucks.) That inspired us to include this question:
Q: Do you think that someone who makes $370,000 in one year has made a lot of money, or not?
A lot of money: 81
Not a lot: 15
Unsure: 4
I'd love to meet that 15% who thinks making $370 large is "not a lot of money." Maybe they could give me some of it. Again, as you'd expect, people who have this skewed view tend to be Republicans and conservatives. By the way, an income of $370K in a single year would put you in, yes, the top 1%. Yet fifteen times that many think being in the 1% doesn't mean you've made "a lot." Bizarrely enough, that actually squares with a poll from last fall which showed that 13% of Americans believed themselves to be in the top 1%. Still, I don't think Mitt Romney's on to a winning game plan here.
And finally, our weekly approval/favorability ratings:
Why the drop? Our pollster Tom Jensen explains:
Obama’s numbers are down mostly because he’s weaker than usual with young voters and Hispanics. That's just going to happen every now and then. He’ll probably bounce back next week.