http://www.usnews.com/opinion/artic...epublican-governors-will-get-obama-re-elected Why Swing State Republican Governors Will Get Obama Re-Elected Governors like Scott Walker, John Kasich, Rick Snyder, and Rick Scott are driving voters back into the Obama 2012 camp By Robert Schlesinger January 25, 2012 The other shoe in the saga of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting crusade dropped last week, and it landed with a ton-and-a-half thud. That's the literal weight of the more than 1 million signatures in favor of Walker's recall that progressive activists gathered over a 60-day window. That's more than 16,000 signatures collected per day. It's nearly as many people as voted for Walker in his 2010 election (1.1 million) and roughly the same number that voted for his opponent. Roughly one in every three registered Wisconsin voters signed up. And since the threshold for a recall election is 540,000 signatures, it virtually guarantees Walker will face the voters this year. But its significance extends beyond the fate of one right-wing zealot. Walker is the best known of a class of freshmen GOP governors whose conservative power grab might be Barack Obama's not-so-secret re-election weapon. Walker, you will recall, ran for governor with nary a word about breaking the backs of the state's public unions and then made it a key part of his signature administration policy, an action he later compared to dropping "the bomb." He sparked a backlash that initially took the form of mass protests, with tens of thousands of enraged Wisconsinites occupying the state capitol before "occupy" became a movement. The 1 million signatures should send a chill up the back of Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or whoever the GOP taps to bear its standard. Wisconsin is a key swing state and the progressive movement just flexed some awfully strong organizational muscle there, sparked by Walker's ham-fisted overreach. The recall election, likely to occur in the late spring or early summer, will serve as a perfect progressive dry run for the Obama re-election in the fall. And Wisconsin is not an isolated example. The Cook Political Report lists 10 states, with 142 electoral votes, as toss-ups. In that group, with 73 total electoral votes, are four states, including Wisconsin, where first-term Republican governors are foundering in the polls after their excessive policies spurred the kind of grass-roots movements that can be a huge boon to a presidential campaign. Take Walker's neighboring colleague, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. With the help of a GOP-controlled legislature, Snyder enacted a law that allows him to appoint "emergency financial managers" in financially troubled cities and school districts. These appointed individuals would have the power to fire actual elected officials, void union contracts, terminate services, sell off assetsâeven eliminate whole cities or school districts. And these localized tyrants could take these actions without any public input. It's no wonder that Michigan State University's "State of the State" poll, released in early December, found that only 19 percent of Wolverine State residents rate Snyder's performance as excellent or good (down from 31.5 percent in the spring). Critics of the law have already collected nearly 200,000 signatures for a November referendum on the law. Snyder's neighbor to the south, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, whose approval rating languishes in the mid-30s, received his stinging rebuke from the public last November. By 62 to 38 percent, voters repealed his legislative centerpiece, a Wisconsin-like law that barred public sector strikes, curtailed collective bargaining rights for public workers, and terminated binding arbitration of management-labor disputes. Opponents collected more than 1 million signatures (there's that number again) to get the issue on the ballot, and raised $30 million in support of repeal, outspending the law's defenders 3 to 1. It was a stunning win for labor unions, with help from Obama's Organizing for America, a mere year after the Ohio GOP had swept every statewide office and won the legislature. "Unions and their allies have done a lot of things transferable to next year," the University of Akron's John Green told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "In some respects, the campaign was a trial run for the presidential." A bonus for the Obama campaign: When Mitt Romney made an October swing through Ohio, he unbelievably pleaded ignorance of the law, prompting speculation that he was trying to avoid endorsing it. So the next day, in Virginia, he announced his foursquare support for it, masterfully reinforcing his reputation as a political calculator even as he landed on the wrong side of the biggest issue in Ohio politics. Rounding out the four horsemen of the GOP's gubernatorial apocalypse is Florida Gov. Rick Scott, whom Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling declared in December to be the nation's most disliked governor when he scored a 26 percent approval rating. That was due in part to the $1.35 billion Scott and the GOP legislature cut from education last year, as well as his push to drug-test welfare recipients. Apparently able to read the polls, Scott now wants to put $1 billion back into education funding, offsetting the spending by cutting $1.8 billion from Medicaid. While a recent Quinnipiac poll found that Scott's approval rating has soared to 38 percent (with 50 percent still disapproving), the same survey showed voters against cutting Medicaid to pay for education by 67 to 24 percent. Perhaps most alarming for Scott and the GOP is that independents disapprove of the governor by an even wider margin than Democrats.
Ill tell you what AK47, since you seem to insist on posting these meaningless polls, that show a huge gap between the republican candidates and Obama.... I will bet you anything you want to that Obama will not win by more than a 3 point spread..... Hows that? If you believe in all these polls you keep spamming you should be more than willing to take that bet.....either that or you are a coward who is unwilling to back his own words up.....
So then since you are basically admitting that Obama wont win by more than a 3 point spread then WTF is the point of spamming these boards relentlessly with these polls that dont mean anything?
You have entered this thread quite hostile and angry.I can understand how seeing the current polls in important swing states can do that to you.Here's a tip,if you use the ignore function you wont see my posts or threads