Bobby Jindal’s Approval Rating Sharply Down

From Southern Media & Opinion Research [PDF]:

Lingering dissatisfaction over higher education and budget cuts, along with pessimism over the state’s direction ontributed to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s declining popularity in Southern Media
Opinion & Research Inc.’s latest statewide survey.

The governor received a 38 percent approval rating in the spring 2013 survey, compared to 51 percent last October.

Jindal’s proposed budget cuts and his plan to replace the state’s income tax with more sales taxes are at the heart of his poor approval numbers. The poll report linked above has the specifics.

More at the NYTA Governor Retrenches on a Big Idea.

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Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Comments

  1. C. Clavin says:

    I am shocked this story is not getting more play.
    Here is a guy in one of the biggest welfare queen states…LA takes far more money from the Fed than they send to the Fed…and more than almost any other state…who tried to pursue the Reddest of economic policies…shield the richest and f*ck the poorest….and was roundly rejected by both citizens and business…as was the Ryan/Romney economic scheme before that.
    Norquist was putting Jindal up as a poster child…calling his plan the;

    “…the boldest, most pro-growth state tax reform in U.S. history…”

    and suprise…he failed miserably.
    The people of this country are saying…NO…we aren’t interested in your failed trickle-down theories.
    You’d hope more journalists and pundits would notice.
    Mataconis was busy predicting the 2014 congressional races.

  2. Ben says:

    From the PDF:

    The poll found 63 percent of respondents opposed Jindal’s tax swap
    proposal. Even among Republicans, slightly less than half said they
    supported the plan to eliminate state income taxes and increase sales
    taxes. The proposal was even less popular among Democrats and
    independents. A mere 9 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of
    independents favored the idea.

    This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, since sales taxes are among the most regressive types of taxes, and this would hit the Louisiana poor and middle classes very hard indeed.

  3. stonetools says:

    Seems like poor and working-class people in Louisiana are finally waking up.

    Had he found a way to make it so black people would suffer more from this legislation than white people , he would have had a winner. Just sayin’.

  4. MarkedMan says:

    This is the kind of thing that really shakes my view of the world. Not that Jindal’s reforms were wildly unpopular, but that he seems to have actually believed in them. This guy was painted as a rising star of the Republican Party but, by god, he actually seems to bee dumb enough to believe in the Heritage/Ryan drivel. Which makes me wonder if my world view is completely askew. Do the Heritage Hacks actually believe what they write? Did Paul Ryan actually read Ayn Rand after his sophomore year and really think she was a genius rather than an embittered crank? Does George Will really believe his ridiculous “facts” about global warming. I’ve always assumed that it was all about riding the Adelson et al gravy train. But if these bozos really believe this nonsense, we may be worse off than even my worst fears.

  5. Moosebreath says:

    Josh Marshall has an intelligent take.

    “But look at what the budget actually did. Broadly speaking it cut back a lot of services that people rely on and redistributed almost all the tax burden onto middle class and lower middle class families. So cut services relied on by the middle class (and below) and make them pay all the taxes. We’re surprised this didn’t catch fire?

    it’s really about the most obvious thing you can imagine and puts it sharp relief the big gap between what excites ideologues in the Republican party and what has a remote chance of flying with the public at large, even in a pretty conservative state like Louisiana.”

  6. Kylopod says:

    puts it sharp relief the big gap between what excites ideologues in the Republican party and what has a remote chance of flying with the public at large, even in a pretty conservative state like Louisiana.

    Also, it exposes the contradictions at the heart of Devil’s Pact between cultural and economic conservatives. Contemporary American economic conservatism–which I refuse to call “fiscal conservatism,” because simply uttering that phrase helps perpetuate the myth that these economic policies have something to do with fiscal prudence–is strictly aimed at lining the pockets of the rich. It isn’t even about lowering taxes per se, it’s about shifting the tax burden from the rich to the middle class and poor, as Jindal’s Norquist-backed plan reveals. But for the past several decades, conservative elites have managed to draw in a certain amount of non-rich supporters, particularly in the South, partly by distracting them with social wedge issues and partly by suckering them into thinking these policies will benefit the common person, through trickle-down theory and other rhetorical devices the elites don’t seriously believe in. The amount of non-rich voters who have fallen for this con game has never been a majority, but it has been just enough to enable the GOP to remain competitive in national elections, something that would be difficult if not impossible for them to do if they presented their policy positions clearly and honestly.