The Partisan Divide in Iowa

By Eric Ostermeier on December 28, 2007

A new Bloomberg / LA Times poll of likely caucus voters in Iowa demonstrates quite clearly how the view of the country is affected by one's political lens. While the outlook on the GOP side is not exceedingly optimistic, it seems so when paired against the glum worldview held by the Democrats.

Only 8 percent of those Democrats and independents voting in the Iowa Democratic caucuses believe the United States is headed in the right direction, with more than 11 times that number, 89 percent, of the view it is seriously off on the wrong track. More than half (53 percent) of Republicans and independents likely to vote in the GOP caucuses believe the country is going in the right direction, with 40 percent believing it is on the wrong track.

The difference in judging the state of the nation's economy also has a great partisan divide with Republicans (74 percent) nearly 50-points more optimistic that the economy is going well compared to the Democrats (28 percent).

The divide is even greater when assessing the Iraq war—73 percent of Republican caucus voters still believe it was worth going to war, while only 12 percent of Democratic caucus voters hold that view. However, despite 83 percent of Democratic voters believing it was not worth going to war, only 28 percent believe the troops should come home right away; 60 percent believe they should come home within the next year. Sixty-eight percent of Republican voters believe the troops should stay in Iraq "as long as it takes," compared to just 7 percent on the Democratic side.

Leave a comment

Name

Email Address

URL

Remember personal info?

Comments (You may use HTML tags for style)

The 40 Percent Floor

June 18, 2013

Although Republicans have won 23 of 39 Indiana gubernatorial races since the first time a GOP candidate was on the ballot in 1860, Democrats have suffered few blow-out defeats during this span. In fact, the Democratic nominee has eclipsed the 40 percent mark in all 39 contests. The Republicans cannot quite claim the same, falling below 40 percent just once with nominee Linley Pearson during the gubernatorial election of 1992 when Evan Byah won his second term. Democrats have a streak of 47 consecutive contests reaching the 40 percent mark - doing so every cycle since the party first fielded a candidate in the race for governor of 1834.

Curse of the '4'?

May 22, 2013

Big-name Republicans are not coming out of the woodwork yet to challenge Al Franken in Minnesota's 2014 U.S. Senate race, and there is not much chatter of the GOP picking off one of the five DFL-held U.S. House seats either. Over the last century, Minnesota Republican U.S. House candidates have not fared all that well in cycles ending in '4' - losing seats in five of these cycles (1914, 1924, 1944, 1954, 1974), holding serve in four others (1964, 1984, 1994, 2004), and gaining seats just one time (1934, after redistricting had been delayed one cycle with all nine seats voted at-large in 1932). Perhaps the Republican Party's best chance for a pick up in the Gopher State in 2014 is if 12-term Democrat Collin Peterson retires after nearly a quarter century on Capitol Hill. The 7th CD has the second largest GOP lean in the state.