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What They Told Us: Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls
Saturday, June 02, 2012 

Friday was a dismal day for Team Obama with the unemployment rate inching back up and throwing cold water on hopes for an economic recovery. It’s not the kind of news the president wants to hear as he campaigns for reelection. 

After all, as Scott Rasmussen contends in his latest syndicated column, “The economy matters more than campaign tactics, and the indicators at the moment are mixed at best. Additionally, most Americans believe that the president’s instincts lead in the wrong direction when it comes to finding solutions.”  

That helps explain why for the first time in five-and-a-half years of regular tracking, half of voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats when it comes to the economy, the issue they rate as by far the most important to how they will vote. 

Even before the release of the new job statistics, Mitt Romney had moved ahead of Obama in the key battleground state of Ohio after the president has led there for several months. This also marks a continuing shift in the critical Core Four states – Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia – with Romney now leading in all four for the first time in Rasmussen Reports polling this year. 

Combined, the Core Four have 75 Electoral College votes, and if the president is successful in even two of these states, it will be just about impossible for the GOP candidate to win the White House. On the other hand, if Romney were to win the four states, the president would probably be out of a job next January. 

Nationally, the two candidates have run within two points of each other for over two weeks now in the daily Presidential Tracking Poll, with the lead seesawing back and forth prior to the jobs report. 

Although voters now trust Romney more than the president on several key issues including the economy, the two run run neck-and-neck when voters are asked if they agree or disagree with the candidates on the issues.  Forty-eight percent (48%) of Likely U.S. Voters personally agree with Romney, while 46% agree with the president. 

Yet most voters aren’t happy with the choices they now face in this year’s presidential election. Just 19% believe Romney and Obama are the two best people running for the presidency. Forty-six percent (46%) say they’ll simply be voting for the lesser of two evils this election year, while slightly fewer (44%) say they are actually excited about the matchup between the president and the former Massachusetts governor. 

Democrats are more enthusiastic about their candidate, but Republicans are more fired up about the upcoming election because of their opposition to Obama. The intensity in the contest still goes to the GOP at this point, Scott Rasmussen explains in a new radio update. [Scott is now doing three Rasmussen Report radio updates every weekday, syndicated nationally by the WOR Radio Network. Check out this week’s radio updates here.] 

One thing that keeps the Republicans energized and has unaffiliated voters unhappy, too, is the president’s national health care law.  Most voters still want to see that law repealed as they have ever since it was passed by Democrats in Congress in March 2010. 

Republicans also continue to lead Democrats on the Generic Congressional Ballot as they have virtually every week for nearly three years now. 

Prior to the new unemployment report, the Rasmussen Consumer and Investor Indexes showed minor improvement for the week, although pluralities of both groups still think the economy is getting worse. 

The youth unemployment rate is already nearly three times higher than it is among all Americans nationwide.  With summer right around the corner, adults feel it’s important for young people to find work, but 84% expect it to be difficult for them to get summer jobs. 

At the same time, the Rasmussen Employment Index which measures workplace confidence jumped eight points in May to its highest level since January 2008. Twenty-three percent (23%) said their firms are hiring, unchanged from April, while 22% reported layoffs. But better than one-in-four workers (27%) remain worried about losing their jobs, down just two points from April which was the highest level of pessimism measured since October. 

Summer is still Americans’ favorite time to take a vacation, and the number who plan a vacation this summer (44%) is up slightly to its highest level in several years. 

With the economy continuing to muddle along, reviews for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Fed itself have improved from late last year, but both remain more disliked than liked. Most voters believe that big banks have too much influence over the Federal Reserve and think those who can benefit from its actions should be barred from serving on the Federal Reserve Board. 

But then we’ve found in surveys for years that most voters think big business and government work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors. It’s this Political Class committed to defending the status quo that stands in the way of real economic change, Scott Rasmussen argues in his latest book, The People’s Money: How the American People Will Balance the Budget and Eliminate the Federal Debt . Voters, he says, are ready to support the kind of long-term thoughtful changes needed to balance the budget and eliminate the federal debt. 

More Americans than ever (64%) are worried the federal government will run out of money in the current economic climate. 

The number of Democrats and Republicans in the United States increased slightly in May, with voters in the president’s party now at their highest level this year. During May, 35.7% of Americans considered themselves Republicans; 33.8% said they were Democrats, while the number of voters not affiliated with either major political party dropped nearly a point-and-a-half to 30.5%. 

Most voters agree that the election system is stacked against third-party candidates and think the rules should be changed to level the playing field. 

Read the rest of this article with links at Rasmussen