Poll: Rendell approval rating slips in Pennsylvania, but by how much?

READ STORY HERE

Six and a half years in as Pennsylvanian Governor, Ed Rendell is now facing perhaps the steepest uphill battle of his term.

A recent Quinnipiac poll suggested that problems with the state budget and Rendell’s heavily unpopular call to raise the income tax has shifted his approval rating from 54% to 39% in just two months. Painful economic times have cost even many of the most popular politicians from across the country, but Rendell’s dramatic fall over such a short period of time points as much toward the man himself as it does his affiliated job title in this crisis.

For starters here are some of the highlights from the Quinnipiac poll. We’ll delve our way into the flaws of this survey in just a minute.

By a nearly two-to-one ratio Pennsylvania voters reject the raising of income taxes even temporarily to help balance the budget. Just as alarming, 90% of Pennsylvanians consider the Governor and State Legislature’s inability to come up with a budget by the long since passed June 30th deadline a “serious problem”. As far as who deserves most of the blame, more voters point the finger at Republicans (17%) in the State Legislature than Democrats (11%), but Rendell receives 30% of the blame against an additional 28% who blame all sides equally.

Rendell’s proposal to raise the state income tax from 3.07% to 3.57% for three years gets support from only around half of Democrats and is wildly unpopular with independents and Republicans. Interestingly by a 62-24% margin most Pennsylvanians think that if there has to be a tax increase of any sort, let it be a hike in the state sales tax. Such a move could be beneficial to those living in the Philadelphia area where much “expensive” shopping is done across state lines in the tax free zone of Delaware already.

Now lets turn our attention from the problems facing Governor Rendell to some of the issues with this specific poll.

Firstly we ought to commend pollsters like Quinnipiac who put the sort of time and dedication into state level polling such as this. Take their sample size as indication. Many national polls do not gather responses from 1,173 voters let alone polls conducted at the state level. That said Quinnipiac’s flaw is not accounting for actual registration totals from the state of Pennsylvania into their sample distribution.

In this poll there were nearly as many Republican voters surveyed (511) as Democrats (512). The 150 filling out the “other” category made up 12.8% of this poll. That isn’t entirely inaccurate from Pennsylvania State Department totals showing registered independents at 11.8%. But the same State Department figures also indicate that currently Democrats outnumber Republicans in terms of registration in Pennsylvania by a margin of 51-37%, not the virtually identical 43.6% depicted here by Quinnipiac.

What we are seeing here then is a skewed depiction of Rendell’s performance with Pennsylvania voters towards the negative side. Take the Governor’s approval rating as an example and reapply the State Department numbers. From responses to the Quinnipiac poll we know that Democrats approve of Rendell’s job performance by a 58-34% margin. We also know that Republicans and independents disapprove by margins of 20-74% and 37-55% respectively.

State Department totals would tell us that the Governor’s overall approval rating should be closer to the neighborhood of a 42-48% split, not the 39-53% being reported by Quinnipiac. While this shows a considerable drop in support for the Governor, from a (+17%) rating in May to a (-6%) or (-7%) rating in July it is not quite the (-14%) plummet being depicted in this poll. As always, consider the source.