The following article by Harry Enten was posted on the FiveThirtyEight.com website November 3, 2017:
Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup. Today’s theme song: “Then Came You” from the television show “Webster.”
Poll of the week
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released this week found that just 25 percent of Americans think President Trump’s tax plan is a good idea — before the legislation had even been presented to the public. More Americans, 35 percent, believe it’s a bad idea. Perhaps most worrying for Trump is that the bill’s level of popularity (again, before its actual unveiling, which happened Thursday) is more comparable to that of recent legislation that didn’t pass than that which did.
Take a look at arguably the two most important pieces of legislation that passed in the past decade: the Affordable Care Act and the 2009 economic stimulus package. With Obamacare, 33 percent of Americans thought it was a good idea in April 2009, when pollsters first asked the question, compared with 26 percent who thought it was a bad idea. The numbers were even better for the economic stimulus package: 43 percent believed it was a good idea in January 2009, when pollsters first asked about it, to just 27 percent who believed it was a bad idea. This initial popularity likely made it easier to move these bills forward. Continue reading “People Are Skeptical Of The GOP’s Tax Bill. Can Trump Change Their Minds?”