With Tax Day just around the corner, it was only natural that we'd want to take the electorate's temperature on this certain-as-death topic. What we found, though, may surprise you.
Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos & SEIU. 4/4-4/7. Registered voters. MoE ±3.1% (no trendlines):
Q: Who do you trust more to keep taxes lower for people like you: Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, or do you trust neither candidate more?
Barack Obama: 41
Mitt Romney: 33
Neither: 24
Unsure: 1
Well how do you like that: Obama is trusted more on taxes than presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney—a finding that turns on its head the conventional wisdom that conservatives fare better on the tax issue. What's more, Obama leads in every single income bracket but one. Can you guess which?
Income |
Obama |
Romney |
Net |
Less than
$30K (19%) |
44 |
26 |
18 |
$30K to
$50K (20%) |
44 |
30 |
14 |
$50K to
$75K (18%) |
46 |
36 |
10 |
$75K to
$100K (16%) |
39 |
35 |
4 |
> $100K (19%) |
36 |
37 |
-1 |
It's no surprise that Romney does best with voters earning more than $100,000 a year, but remarkably, even there, his edge is just a single point. It seems that decades of rhetoric about how the GOP is "good on taxes" may finally be running into a different reality. I wouldn't be surprised if Mitt Romney's well-earned image as both a member of—and a fighter on behalf of—the 1 percent is in part responsible for chinks appearing in the Republican facade on this issue. It also suggests that, given his larger reserve of trust on the topic of taxation, the president is right to forge ahead on the Buffett Rule—something we've found in the past polls extremely well. (Incidentally, we'll be revisiting that particular question in our next poll.)
But what's also great about polls like this is how they really can serve to fight entrenched CW that exists for no other reason than the Beltway says so. We saw this illustrated very well with the snap poll of the presidential debates in 2008, where pundits were desperate to give a win to John McCain but kept getting confronted by instant polling results which showed that no, the public overwhelmingly preferred Obama's performance. I certainly wouldn't want to declare a sea change on taxes just yet, but these kinds of convention-defying results are why we'll always keep polling the issues, and always keep releasing our numbers each week—because we are, after all, proud members of the reality-based community.
P.S. As always, our approval and favorability numbers can be found on our weekly trends page.