Martha Coakley Pollster: White House and Congress have failed to confront Wall Street

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Tue Jan-19-10 10:50 PM
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Martha Coakley Pollster: White House and Congress have failed to confront Wall Street

Coakley Pollster Defends Campaign Against White House
By Ryan Grim
January 19, 2010

The blame game is fully underway. A top pollster to Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley told HuffPost on Tuesday that the White House, in attempting to blame the Coakley campaign for a potential defeat today in Massachusetts, underestimates the wave of populist fury among Massachusetts voters.

Pollster Celinda Lake said Coakley was hampered by the failure of the White House and Congress to confront Wall Street. That failure, she said, means that Democrats are being blamed by angry independent voters worried about the state of the economy.

"If Scott Brown wins tonight he'll win because he became the change-oriented candidate. Voters are still voting for the change they voted for in 2008, but they want to see it. And right now they think they've got economic policies for Washington that are delivering more for banks than Main Street."

Lake said that the problem for Democrats is that voters are blaming them for the nation's poor economic conditions. "2010 is fast turning out to be a blame election and I think that either we are going to characterize who deserves the blame - whether that's banks and lobbyists and people who still want to hold on to national Republican economic strategies - or we're going to get the blame. And that's a very different tone than, often, the administration is comfortable with," she said.

The tit-for-tat over tactics, said Lake, risks missing the wave that is headed toward Democrats. "There's a lot of blame to go around, but the point of the matter is there's a wave. And that wave: it hit Virginia; it hit New Jersey; it hit Massachusetts," she said.

Michael Dimock, associate director with The Pew Research Center, said he's seen the movement that Lake's referring to in his organization's polling. "People are really bummed about what's going on economically...Obama and the Democrats own what's going on," he said. "Independents, almost by definition, they're not driven by ideology, they're effected by current circumstances and right now current circumstances suck. We're stuck in two wars; the economy's terrible; Washington looks like a train wreck more than ever before."

If nothing changes, she said, the wave will continue wiping out Democrats. "We're either going to get buried by the wave or we're going to ride it. And we're running out of time to ride it. Somebody is going to get the blame for what's happening right now to the American public. They're incredibly angry and incredibly frustrated. And somebody's going to get credit for trying to turn it around. And right now, we're getting the blame and we're not getting the credit and that formula has to change," she said.

Traditionally, Democrats hold a heavy advantage over Republicans when voters are asked who they trust to handle the economy. Not so today. "When six times more people think that the banks benefited from the stimulus than working families, you've got a problem. And it's not just a problem with what Martha Coakley did in her campaign," said Lake.

Read the full article at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/coakley-pollster-defends_n_428600.html