Florida voters happy to see debt ceiling deal, unhappy with politicians who made the deal

Viewpoint Florida’s latest survey shows that likely voters in Florida seem very content with the passage of a deal in Congress to raise the national debt ceiling.

We asked likely voters if they would be more or less likely to re-elect their Congressman if they knew s/he voted for a plan passed last week that raised the debt ceiling. 58% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for a Congressman who backed the deal, while just 36% said they would be less likely to support such a Congressman. When testing the intensity of these positions, ‘much more likely’ leads the ‘much less likely’ position by 10 points (26%-16%).

Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to be supportive of a Congressman who backed last week’s debt ceiling deal, with 59% of respondents in both parties saying they would be more likely to re-elect a Congressman who supported the measure. Independent voters were slightly more likely to oppose their member of Congress if s/he voted for the debt deal.

But despite the favorable impressions of the debt ceiling legislation and the members of Congress who backed it, voters have little good to say about the parties who put the deal together. 41% of respondents said that nobody in the debt ceiling negotiations did a good job during the long process. 28% of respondents say President Obama did a good job during the negotiations, while 21% gave good marks to Republicans in Congress. Finally, just 8% of respondents had anything good to say for Congressional Democrats and their conduct in the debt ceiling negotiations.

Democrats were significantly more positive toward President Obama and his work on the debt ceiling negotiations than Republicans were towards members of their party in Congress, with 49% of Democrats approving of President Obama to just 38% of Republicans approving of the GOP Congressional delegation. And Independent voters proved to be much more likely to pan every party in the negotiations, with 52% saying nobody did a good job at all.

The study was conducted on August 7th, 2011 among 801 Florida registered voters likely to vote in the 2012 General Election. The margin of error is +/- 3.5%.

Full Results & Crosstabs

For details see Methodology

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