Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Poll shows dissatisfaction with leaders
A survey of Virginia residents also showed they thought stimulus money hasn't helped.
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roanoke.com/politics
Most Virginians are generally frustrated with how elected state officials have handled deep budget cuts caused by the economic recession and aren't seeing evidence that federal stimulus money has helped the state, according to a new poll.
The survey of likely voters, conducted by the Judy Ford Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, also found that most oppose raising taxes or laying off state employees to meet the state's budget needs.
"There's a certain lack of reality there," said James Koch, an economist and former president of Old Dominion University, who was shown the poll results. "People say they don't want to get rid of any state employees, but that's about 70 percent of the state budget. They say they don't want to increase state taxes. ... What do you have in mind?"
About 70 percent of those polled said Gov. Tim Kaine and the General Assembly could do a better job of handling the state revenue shortfall, while about 21 percent said the cuts were acceptable.
The poll, which involved telephone interviews with 506 likely voters on Oct. 8-13, was conducted for The Virginian-Pilot and WVEC-TV of Norfolk. It has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
In recent years, Kaine has been forced to deal with nearly $7 billion in revenue shortfalls and has announced the layoffs of hundreds of state employees and cutbacks in state services to help ease spending. Other cuts have included unpaid days off for state workers, closing two prisons and reducing funding for state universities.
When those polled were asked if millions of dollars in federal stimulus funds had helped Virginia's economy, 63 percent said they think the money had no effect on the state. Twenty percent said the infusion helped Virginia, while 7.5 percent said it hurt.
"I don't think people know where the money went, and they don't clearly see it," said Quentin Kidd, director of CNU's policy center. "Everybody from the president down said this was going to be used for infrastructure. ... Apparently it's not being seen in action in most places in the state."
While likely voters were discouraged by the state's budget problems, they were slightly more upbeat about overall conditions in Virginia than in the United States as a whole.
Thirty-five percent of those polled said the state is heading in the right direction, compared with 32 percent who said the state was going the wrong way. By comparison, half of those polled said the nation is going in the wrong direction.
All the concerns aside, Koch said the poll does indicate that people's views about the future are improving. About one-third of those polled said they believe the national economy will be improving in six months, compared with 22 percent who say it will get worse and 41 percent who say there will be no change.
Koch said the number of people who think conditions will improve is larger than what his own research found a few months ago.
"People are little more optimistic," he said. "But they're not wildly optimistic."
