As the budget negotiations grind to a halt, it’s helpful to keep in mind two important characteristics of the American electorate.
The first is that voters tend to like compromise. In poll after poll, solid majorities of voters say they prefer leaders who compromise over those who stick to their guns. The latest Pew poll is typical: by 55 percent to 36 percent, voters say it is important to compromise on the budget as opposed to standing by principles, even if it means a government shutdown.
The poll is also typical in finding that Democrats are significantly more likely to favor compromise (69 percent do) than Republicans (only 43 percent do). And Tea Partiers, not surprisingly are the most intransigent (only 26 percent favor compromise).
Of course, the same poll found that voters would blame the two sides about equally, with Democrats blaming Republicans and Republicans blaming Obama, with independents split, presumably also along partisan-leaning lines (since most independents are closet partisans). So neither side has a clear advantage right now. Opinion seems to be pretty much solidified along partisan lines.
While it’s not clear Democrats have an advantage on being the party of compromise right now, presumably that will change if a government shutdown does occur and Tea Partiers celebrate and proclaim that their principled stand forced this. This will, of course, help the Democrats.
The second characteristic is that Americans tend to be symbolic conservatives, but operational liberals. What this means in practice is that when government is discussed in the abstract (like, say, in a number) people want less of it. But when it’s discussed in the specific (like, say, any actual program) people like it.
Consider the polling: When asked, 64 percent of Americans think “federal spending and the budget deficit” is a problem that they worry “a great deal” about. But a recent Pew poll found not a single budgetary area in which a majority of voters would favor a decrease, and only two federal programs in which more respondents favored a decrease in spending than an increase: Global poverty assistance (45 percent for a decrease, 21 percent for an increase) and unemployment assistance (28 percent for a decrease, 27 percent for an increase). Cuts to these two line items get you nowhere near $61 billion.
Presumably, Democrats should by now have found a sympathetic, sensible program that Republicans wanted to cut, and let that program stand in for Republicans heartlessness. But I don’t know: Maybe they don’t see that much worth aggressively and publicly defending in the $28 billion that separates them and the Republicans. And in an argument about how much to cut Government (in the abstract), the public is probably going to come down on the side of MORE.
Of course, the larger problem here is that we’re still talking about small potatoes. The federal budget is $3.5 trillion. That means we’re talking here about cutting it by either one or two percent here. That’s because this debate is all about non-military discretionary spending, which is only 13 percent of the overall budget. It remains frustrating to see this lack of context in the way the budget showdown keeps getting reported.
