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2010-10-13 11:24:48
Tue Oct 12, 6:53 am ET
By JANE SASSEEN
Yahoo! News
Anger: It's the defining political emotion of this campaign season. It's
boiling across the country, much of it directed at President Obama and the
congressional Democrats over the way they have handled the economy. Not far
behind is dissatisfaction.
The combination, detected in a new ABC News/Yahoo! News poll, spells trouble
for Democrats three weeks out from the election. Angry people, analysts say, go
out and vote. Dissatisfied people tend to stay home.
With the recovery stalling, unemployment stuck at 9.6 percent and the housing
crisis entering a dangerous new phase as bungled paperwork and outright fraud
force a halt to foreclosures across the country, there's plenty to get upset
about.
The poll, a national, random-sample survey conducted by Langer Research
Associates, shows just how deep the anger runs: A sky-high 25 percent of
Americans say they are angry about the state of the economy many more of them
Republicans than Democrats, a key reason why the economy's woes appear to be
playing to the GOP's favor.
[Will Tea Party Label Hurt in Midterms?]
Dissatisfaction, which thus far has grabbed few headlines, runs sharply through
an even larger swath of the electorate, but it holds just as much peril for the
Democrats struggling to hold onto control of Congress and many statewide
offices. Fully another 60 percent of Americans say they are dissatisfied with
the economy and many of them are Democrats.
So just who is angry? And who is dissatisfied? And where are they?
The short answer: pretty much everyone and everywhere. The real story
underlying this election may be how uniform and broadly felt the unhappiness
is.
[Election Anger at Stake in Governors' Races]
"The president can talk about the economy recovering, but no one believes him,"
says Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf. While many analysts have compared
this year with 1994, when an unhappy electorate sent many Democratic incumbents
packing and handed control of the House to the GOP for the first time in 40
years, Sheinkopf points out the shift then was mostly fueled by "angry white
men." This time, "it's angry everybody."
Lane McCammon, 54, a retired engineer now living in Stallings, N.C.,
undoubtedly speaks for many as he ticks off the reasons for his ire.
"Unemployment just kept going up and up and up. The stimulus has been an
absolute disaster. Cash for clunkers people took the money and bought
foreign-made cars," McCammon laughs in obvious disgust. "This has been a
pathetic Congress. They are spending money like drunken sailors."
[Why "Bailout" is a Dirty Word]
"I'm very angry. My wife is angry. We're an angry household here," adds
McCammon, who voted for McCain and thinks Obama doesn't have a chance of being
re-elected in 2012.
It's often the case that political trends are felt more strongly in one region
or demographic group than another. With anger coursing much more deeply through
GOP veins than Democratic ones, for example, analyst Greg Valliere of the
Potomac Research Group says he'd expect it to be "a bigger factor in
Republican-leaning regions like the South."
This year, however, that isn't holding true.
From California's craggy coastline to the wide-open Plains states to the small
towns that dot the South, a remarkably consistent 26 percent to 27 percent
describe themselves as angry over the economy. While the anger meter drops
slightly, to 20 percent, in the traditionally more moderate, Democratic leaning
Northeast, the difference isn't statistically significant.
The story is much the same when other results from the ABC News/Yahoo! News
poll are examined.
Break the country down by income, and in every category roughly a quarter of
the respondents report they are angry: from the 24 percent of those getting by
on less than $25,000 to the 26 percent of those pulling in more than $100,000.
Dissatisfaction is amazingly uniform across a range of paychecks, too. Some 58
percent of those making between $50,000 and $75,000 reported being dissatisfied
with the economy hardly different from the 61 percent and 60 percent
dissatisfaction rates reported among the lowest and highest income levels,
respectively.