Good News For Republicans

Americans still don't trust government.

The liberal spin on these numbers is summed up by Stanley Greenberg:

In their breathtaking incompetence and comprehensive failure in government, Republicans have undermined Americans' confidence in the ability of government to play a role in solving America's problems ...

The scale of damage done to people's belief in government is enormous. The results of a February study we conducted for Democracy Corps that assessed people's attitudes toward government stunned us. By 57 percent to 29 percent, Americans believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life instead of helping people. Sixty-two percent in a Pew study said they believe elected officials don't care what people like them think, and the same number believe that whenever something is run by the government it is probably inefficient and wasteful. The Democracy Corps study found that an emphatic 83 percent say that if the government had more money, it would waste it rather than spend it well. The government receives a job approval rating of more than 50 percent on only one issue -- national security. On nearly every other issue, a majority of Americans disapprove of government's performance.

So Americans' distrust for government is all the Bush Administration's fault, huh? Let's look at the trends over time, courtesy of Pew:

Yes, Bushian incompetence has driven Americans' confidence in government to new lows. But it wasn't exactly that high to begin with: Not in the divided-government years of the late 1990s, and certainly not in the Democratic majority years of '92-'94. No matter who's in power, post-Sixties Americans just aren't that impressed with government's ability to get things done. Which is why even with the political wind at their back in many respects, the progressive movement can't just coast into a glorious new era of ever-expanding social democracy. As Greenberg, Matt, and Ed Kilgore all note, liberalism still needs to convince the public that government can do the things that growing numbers of Americans think it should do.

This gives conservatives an opening, if they can seize it, to recover the sound-government tradition that was crucial to the success of Ronald Reagan, the Contract with America, and 1990s figures as diverse as Tommy Thompson and Rudy Giuliani. (That would be the Reagan who said, in a quote I probably overuse: "It is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work-work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.") The danger, though, is that things have gone too badly in the Bush years for the GOP to be a plausible standard-bearer for sound government; the other danger is that right-wingers will look at the numbers quoted above and think that the time is ripe for a new crusade against government. Which will more or less guarantee more results like these:

White working-class women, who had voted Republican by 57 percent to 42 percent in 2004, backed them by only 52 percent to 47 percent in 2006 -- a 10-point shift. This movement away from the GOP included a stunning 26-point shift by white working-class women with annual household incomes between $30,000 and $50,000, who went from pro-Republican (60 percent to 39 percent) in 2004 to pro-Democratic (52 percent to 47 percent) in 2006 ... While Democrats enjoyed significant gains among noncollege whites earning between $50,000 and $75,000 annually, they made their most dramatic gains among white working-class voters making between $30,000 to $50,000. In the 2004 congressional elections, these voters had favored Republicans by 60 percent to 38 percent; in 2006 they divided their vote equally between Democrats and Republicans. That's a 22-point shift.

These are the voters torn between their distrust for government and their desire for economic security - and they're the people the GOP needs to find a new way to reach, and fast.

Comments

How is that good news for the GOP? Since when the GOP has actually supported small goverment, aside from the rethoric?

Posted by Sergio Méndez | June 22, 2007 7:29 PM

Interesting how support of government started increasing 3 or 4 months before the start of 2002. I wonder if some event happened around then that would have caused a huge shift in public opinion that would have nothing to do with the competence or lack thereof of Bush and the Republicans?

Posted by Alex | June 22, 2007 9:40 PM

I analyzed how this was probably NOT good news for Republicans here.

Posted by John Savage | June 23, 2007 12:24 PM

Ross recently had a good post that showed how libertarian arguments tend to be circular. They start from libertarian first principles and then use the evidence at hand to "prove" that libertarian positions are reasonable and popular.

The same could easily be said for the way Ross starts from conservative first principles here and then uses the poll data to "prove" that conservative attitudes are popular. The unstated assumption in his post is that anyone who believes the government is inefficient, wasteful, and detached from the public interest, must possess a corresponding doe-eyed faith in the magic powers of the market.

What's missing here is a similar set of poll questions regarding public trust of health insurance companies, credit card companies, oil companies, and the other powerful corporate institutions that people deal with on a regular basis, which liberals generally want the government to regulate more stringently, and whose interests conservatives generally want the government to serve.

What's also missing is an understanding that the Democratic Party is not the one running on a platform of "we're from the government, trust us." In recent years, the only political figures expressing a distrust of the heavy-handed national security state, uninhibited lobbying, unaccountable bureaucracy, etc., have been Democrats. Assuming that any of these poll results can be directly translated to opposition to universal health care, for instance, would be a serious mistake.

Granted, these polls aren't exactly great news for progressives. But they do show an opening for politicians whose goal is to make the government do more for the benefit of the people.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | June 23, 2007 3:56 PM

"But they do show an opening for politicians whose goal is to make the government do more for the benefit of the people."

An alternate explanation is mass skepticism in the notion that government is (can be?) "for the benefit of the people" -- i.e. a rejection of the specific article the. "Congress works for somebody, but not for me." -- universalized.

Of course, if everybody feels cheated/ignored/exploited, perhaps government is doing something right. Or perhaps we've relearned the old lesson that government is a necessary evil (stress on the evil). It is a lesson that will always have able and willing teachers.

Posted by John Aristides | June 23, 2007 6:02 PM

"things have gone too badly in the Bush years for the GOP to be a plausible standard-bearer for sound government"
There's the refutation of your headline right there. You Republicans have created a nightmare, abroad and at home, and now you think that will make people more open to the "Republican message" (whatever that is)? Dream on. People may say they want small government, in the abstract, but they don't say they want to get rid of anything government does, in the specific.

Posted by alwsdad | June 23, 2007 10:13 PM

I don't trust the government, and faced with the choice between a party that simply shares my distrust for the government and a party that has incentives to prove me wrong, I reluctantly prefer the latter. The former, when in government, simply has too little interest in behaving efficiently, as it can always interpret growing distrust for government as good for their electoral chances.

On the other hand, I do not trust the free market to produce, in every circumstance, the best outcomes for a nation's citizens. In the specific case of health care, I am willing to sacrifice gains in wealth and productivity, if the trade-off is a more equitable distribution of the cost of health care. I find the current system appalling.

Posted by pedro | June 24, 2007 7:35 AM

First, please note that the rates of trust/distrust seem to increase/decrease cyclically, we've been here befrore and rebounded from this point. Second, it hardly seems to be a point of pride for Republicans that they have proved they can make the government inefficient, corrupt, and intrusve. Talk about a pyrrhic victory. I mean if they plan to fade from power a la the Whigs and let someone other party that can provide small and effective govenment rise, that's very noble of them. The libertarians are tanned, rested, and ready.

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