This article resonates big time with me.
I am not a straight-ticket voter. I am not a member of either major political party. I like to vote for qualifications and position on the issues, not necessarily in that order. With our current brokedick two-party system, I have NEVER found a political candidate to match my own ideals and that's why we have the "hold your nose and pull the lever" kind of voting process anymore.
I hate voting AGAINST a candidate, but find that to be the rule rather than the exception.
So I think the poll referenced below captures me nicely, and perhaps a few of you too.
Swing Voters Don't Want Big Government
Survey results Barack Obama and the GOP would be wise to heed.
By PAT TOOMEY
Barack Obama and congressional Democrats won big on Tuesday night, but they should not mistake their victory for a big-government mandate. The evidence tells a very different story.
A poll commissioned by the Club for Growth in 12 swing congressional districts over the past weekend shows that the voters who made the difference in this election still prefer less government -- lower taxes, less spending and less regulation -- to Sen. Obama's economic liberalism. Turns out, Americans didn't vote for Mr. Obama and Democratic congressional candidates because they support their redistributionist agenda, but because they are fed up with the Republican politicians in office. This was a classic "throw the bums out" election, rather than an embrace of the policy views of those who will replace them.
Although currently held by Republican congressmen, all but one of these 12 districts we surveyed flipped to Democratic control Tuesday night. Collectively, President Bush carried these districts in 2004 with 53%. They are nearly evenly split in party affiliation: 40% Democratic, 37% Republican and 19% Independent. The poll surveyed 800 voters with a margin of error of +/- 3.46 percentage points.
Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district will always support universal health care, and Jeff Flake's Arizona district will always support less government. But the 12 districts we surveyed represent the political middle of the country, and in this cycle their partisan allegiances changed. The question is, have their opinions on the issues changed as well? The answer is emphatically no.
Consider the most salient aspects of Mr. Obama's economic agenda: the redistribution of wealth through higher taxes on America's top earners; the revival of the death tax; raising the tax on capital gains and dividend income; increased government spending; increased government involvement in the housing crisis; a restriction on offshore drilling and oil exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR); and "card check" legislation stripping workers of their right to a secret ballot in union elections.
On each of these issues, swing voters stand starkly against Mr. Obama. According to the Club's poll, 73% of voters prefer the federal government to focus on "creating economic conditions that give all people opportunities to create wealth through their own efforts" over "spreading wealth from higher income people to middle and lower income people." Two-thirds of respondents prefer to see the permanent elimination of the death tax, and 65% prefer to keep capital gains and dividend tax rates at their current lows.
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