Voters’ Top Concern: The Deficit Gop Gets Most Of Blame For Budget Gridlock, Poll Shows

In his State of the Union Message tonight, President Clinton will address a public that is suddenly expressing new concerns about the federal deficit but still gives Clinton higher marks than the Republican Congress for trying to break the budget impasse, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

The survey of public sentiment at the opening of the presidential campaign shows that the months of turmoil on Capitol Hill over balancing the budget have propelled the deficit to the forefront of the public’s agenda. After years of ranking the economy or crime as the most important issue facing the nation, people now put the deficit first.

The battle over the budget has also left three out of 10 Americans with the view that politics in Washington is more mean-spirited than in the past, and six out of 10 expect the budget standoff to drag on for a long time, the poll shows.

But people pin more blame on the Republicans: six out of 10 surveyed said Clinton was really trying to find a solution to the budget standoff, while only four out of 10 said Republicans in Congress were really trying.

As Clinton delivers the speech that is intended to serve as the thematic preview of his re-election drive, he can take comfort that the voters in his own party have remained remarkably loyal.

Seventy-nine percent of the Democrats polled said they had a favorable opinion of Clinton, his highest rating ever. His overall job approval rating among all those surveyed remained fairly steady at 47 percent, down only four percentage points from December. Nevertheless, approval ratings at this stage of a campaign are rarely a reliable indicator of how a candidate will fare on Election Day.

The poll was done in a telephone survey of 1,076 adults nationwide from Jan. 18 to 20; it has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

The poll indicates that Clinton faces a nation that, while uneasy about the economy, is somewhat less gloomy than four years ago. Sixty-four percent of those polled said they were generally dissatisfied with “the way things are going in the United States at this time.”

But the public does not appear to be fixated on a single issue, as when President George Bush was gearing up for his re-election campaign. At this time in 1992, an overwhelming 51 percent of those surveyed cited the economy and jobs as the nation’s most pressing problem.

Asked in the current survey to identify the most important problem facing the country, 19 percent cited the deficit, up from only 8 percent in October. While that figure shows that the entire public is not preoccupied with the deficit, 19 percent is a significant number because most other issues scored in only single digits.

The surge of interest in the deficit might also reflect heavy news coverage of the issue. Seventeen percent identified the economy and jobs as the most important issue, followed by 13 percent citing crime and violence.

And, in answer to a separate question, 68 percent said balancing the budget was more important than cutting taxes; 27 percent said a tax cut was more important.