"If ______ is elected President, do you think the policies of his/her administration will favor the rich, favor the middle class, favor the poor, or will they treat all groups the same?"
Rich Middle Poor Same DK
Aug 2007 John Edwards 30% 24% 9% 18% 19%
Mar 2008 Hillary Clinton 23% 29% 13% 28% 7%
Mar 2008 Barack Obama 13% 30% 18% 33% 6%
Mar 2008 John McCain 53% 16% 0 23% 8%
Oct 2008 McCain 59% 11% 3% 21% 6%
Oct 2008 Obama 8% 38% 22% 24% 8%
Jul 2012 Mitt Romney 53% 11% 2% 30% 4%
Sep 2012 Obama 12% 26% 22% 30% 10%
Sep 2012 Romney 53% 8% 1% 33% 6%
Sep 2012 Obama 9% 27% 31% 26% 7%
Oct 2016 Donald Trump 57% 14% 1% 27% 1%
Oct 2016 Clinton 37% 24% 14% 22% 3%
The figures for the Republicans--McCain, Romney, and Trump--are just about the same, with between 53 and 59 percent saying their policies would favor the rich, but there are substantial differences among the Democrats. With Obama, between 9 and 13 percent said his policies would favor the rich; with Hillary Clinton, it was 23% in 2008 and 37% in 2016. I had a post about a similar question that was asked in 2008 and June-July 2016, which also showed that McCain and Trump were just about the same but that Clinton was substantially different from Obama. I said "One possibility is that it's a fixed part of her image--maybe people are thinking of the well-compensated speeches she's made to Wall Street firms. Another possibility is that the contrast with Bernie Sanders made people think of her as more favorable to rich, and that as people start focusing on the contrast with Trump perceptions will change...." We can rule the second one out given the results of the October 2016 survey (it was taken less than two weeks before the election). However, it wasn't completely fixed--it was there in 2008 and stronger in 2016.
The pattern doesn't fit the way that the different candidates have usually been depicted in the media. In 2008, Clinton was usually presented as down-to-earth and Obama as a bit of an elitist (sometimes even "professorial". And there have been many stories contrasting the conventional businessman Romney with the "populist" Trump, who sometimes talked about an infrastructure program or closing tax loopholes that benefited "the hedge fund guys."
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
If I may disagree slightly with the media portrayal comment, I think a significant jump between Obama and Clinton can be explained by a significant portion of the electorate as seeing Obama as the president of 'Black America', not their America. The jump in helping the poor makes sense then, as many white folks simply associate poor and black as connected. Conservative media certainly argued this point several times throughout his presidency.
ReplyDeleteAlso, perhaps Donald Trump's portrayal of Hillary as being owned by Goldman Sachs and Wall Street would also help explain this significant jump. Speaking anecdotally I know in my extended Irish Catholic, working class family both these opinions existed. That Hillary was owned by Wall Street and that Obama only cared about black people.