By Lea Kahn
It didn’t take a Ph.D. degree to figure out that the Democrats would lose some seats in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterm elections earlier this month.
That’s because it was a “very much predictable” event and if anyone had asked him last spring, Frank Newport said, he would have replied that the political landscape looked dismal for the Democrats and rosy for the Republicans.
Dr. Newport offered his interpretation of the Nov. 2 election to about 60 people at Rider University on Nov. 17. The editor-in-chief of the Gallup Organization Inc. was invited to speak by the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, which is based at Rider.
The midterm election was not so much a Republican mandate but an anti-Congress mandate more than anything else, driven in part by a bad economy and the distrust of what is taking place in Washington, D.C., Dr. Newport said. And voters will continue to “throw out” the politicians, he said.
Based on years of polling experience, Dr. Newport said, the midterm elections are ruled by “structural issues” — the presidential and congressional job approval, satisfaction with the way things are going in the U.S., the economy and voter enthusiasm.
The presidential job rating is the most important factor in the midterm elections, he said. President Obama had a job approval rating of 45 percent and when the job approval rating is less than 50 percent, the average seat loss is 36 seats.
And regardless of who occupies the White House in 2014, which would be the next midterm election, that president is virtually assured of losing his or her political party’s seats in Congress, he said.
”If President Obama is in the White House in 2014, mark my words, his party will lose seats,” Dr. Newport said.
The only exception in recent years was President George W. Bush, whose Republican Party kept its seats in the 2002 midterm elections because the terror attacks of Sept. 11 were still fresh in voters’ memory, he said.
Voters also are dissatisfied with Congress. The job approval rating of Congress usually is about 34 percent. When the congressional job approval rating dips below 40 percent, on average there is a loss of 28 seats, he said. But this time, voters gave Congress a 21 percent job approval rating.
And voters were not satisfied with the way things were going in the U.S., Dr. Newport said. The satisfaction rating, based on Gallup Organization polling, was 21 percent. Consumer confidence in the economy was “in the basement,” as only 12 percent rated it as good, he said.
When the Gallup pollsters asked what was the most important problem facing the nation, one-third of respondents mentioned jobs or unemployment, he said. The result earlier this month was the “kick the dog” phenomenon — voters were angry and they took it out on the party in power by “throwing the bums out,” he said.
”Change is what (the voters) were after,” Dr. Newport said.
Although the economy is important, one factor that may be overlooked is the impact of religion on voting behavior, he said. Religion is associated with emotion, which in turn is associated with enthusiasm about voting.
Religion is one of the biggest predictors of one’s politics, Dr. Newport said. Polling has shown that a person who goes to church on a regular basis is more likely to identify as a Republican than a Democrat and since religion is associated with emotion, that person is more enthusiastic about voting, he said. Republicans clearly were more enthusiastic about voting.
So what did the 2010 elections really tell pollsters?
One of the major defining issues — and “the key issue of our time” — is the role of the federal government, Dr. Newport said. President Obama is perceived to believe that government is the answer to all problems, and the health-care reform bill was symbolic of that to many voters, he said.
Republicans are fearful that the federal government will go too far and try to solve problems that it should not be trying to solve, Dr. Newport said.
The other defining issue is that Americans have little faith in Congress, he said. Only 9 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll rated members of Congress as having high ethical standards. The result is going to be a continuing pattern of throwing them out, he said.
