Two major national polls were released today and both of them are nothing but bad news for the Bush White House.<\/p>\n
A USA Today\/CNN\/Gallup poll<\/a> shows Kerry leading Bush by a sizable 8-point margin, 52%-44% among likely voters. Looking at some of the finer details, there’s plenty more good news in the results.<\/p>\n * Kerry leads Bush among women voters (53%-43%), which is expected, but also leads among men (47%-46%), which is unusual.<\/p>\n * Bush’s overall approval rating is 49%, equal to his all-time low in USA Today\/CNN\/Gallup polls.<\/p>\n * By a better than two-to-one margin (66%-30%), people said it is “inappropriate” for candidate to use 9\/11 images in campaign ads, as Bush is.<\/p>\n * When asked which candidate they’d trust to handle policy issues, poll respondents backed Kerry on nearly every domestic issue. Kerry led Bush in handling the economy (50%-42%), education (47%-43%), the budget deficit (53%-37%), health care (55%-36%), Social Security (51%-36%), and protecting citizens’ privacy (49%-40%). Bush led Kerry in handling gay marriage (46%-41%), Iraq (54%-39%), terrorism (60%-33%), and foreign affairs in general (50%-42%). * 57 percent say they want the next president to steer the country away from the course set by Bush.<\/p>\n * Bush’s overall approval rating is 50%, equal to his all-time low in Post\/ABC polls, while the proportions of Americans who disapprove (48%) and strongly disapprove (36%) have never been higher.<\/p>\n * Of a dozen policy areas, Kerry leads Bush in eight. Kerry’s lead on policy issues is surprisingly large, with double-digit advantages over Bush as the person best able to handle the economy (12% lead over Bush), Social Security (16% lead), education (12% lead), the budget deficit (15% lead), and health care (20% lead).<\/p>\n And panic starts to set in with the GOP establishment…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two major national polls were released today and both of them are nothing but bad news for the Bush White House. A USA Today\/CNN\/Gallup poll shows Kerry leading Bush by a sizable 8-point margin, 52%-44% among likely voters. Looking at some of the finer details, there’s plenty more good news in the results. * Kerry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nA Washington Post\/ABC poll<\/a> showed similarly encouraging results. In fact, these poll numbers closely mirrored the USA Today surbey. In a head-to-head match-up, Kerry leads Bush by nine points, 53%-42%. In addition,<\/p>\n