Rick Perry, meet your base.
A PPP poll out on Wednesday illustrates a clear contradiction within the GOP electorate: overwhelming majorities of voters who deride President Obama as a socialist, but who also love actual real social welfare programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — and don’t want to see them cut.
For a candidate like Rick Perry, that cognitive dissonance could present real problems. He’s rocketed to the front of the pack on the strength of his appeal to the Tea Party, where the Obama-as-socialist rhetoric runs red hot. He’s also pretty much declared war on Social Security.
71 percent of Republicans in the poll agree that President Obama is a socialist. But 75 percent of them don’t think that the government should end Social Security. 78 percent think that ending Medicare would be a bad idea. And 61 percent say the same about Medicaid (health care for the poor).
The poll also shows what others have: Texas Gov. Rick Perry is far ahead of the field, with 31 percent of the vote.
Perry’s famously stated that Social Security is a “ponzi sceme,” and has consistently defended that assessment. But only 33 percent of those polled thought was an accurate description of the program, versus 53 percent who didn’t. That means there is significant group, a 16 percent gap, between people who agree the program is a crime (ponzi sceme) but support eliminating it, which was the position of only 17 percent. In other words, despite the fact that Social Security is a federal offense, we should keep it anyway.
But the numbers also suggest that Perry’s yet to pay a political price — at least among the GOP base — for his position on Social Security. Perry picks up an extra 9 percent among those who do think that Social Security is a ponzi scheme.
Elsewhere in the poll, on the fight between the science and anti-science sets of the Republican party, 27 percent think that global warming exists, but 27 percent also believe that natural disasters are caused by God, as Michele Bachmann “joked” at a campaign apparence. So it’s either global warming, or God, or maybe global warming is caused by God? No follow up question on that.
Perry picks up an extra 7 percent among the global warming skeptics, and an extra 5 from those who doubt evolution.
So it appears Rick Perry isn’t yet suffering the slings and arrows of the central contradictions within the Republican base. But he’s also only just started to take punches from his opponents, who are all of course fighting for their own share of the pie. Thus a useful reminder in the form of this poll that a label, no matter how divorced from the truth, can be a useful political tool, and one commonly deployed in a political primary.
The PPP poll used 500 automated telephone interviews with usual Republican primary voters conducted from September 8th to the 11th. It has a sampling error of 4.4 percent.
