2008 Election Poll      

Posted on Wed, May. 14, 2008

Kentuckians upset with legislature

By Jack Brammer

JBRAMMER@HERALD-LEADER.COM

FRANKFORT --

Two of every three Kentucky voters don’t like the way the Kentucky legislature is doing its job, a new poll shows.

The public’s job-approval rating for the General Assembly appears to be worsening. A similar poll conducted last October showed 44 percent of likely voters in Kentucky gave thumbs down to the legislature’s performance.

The latest Herald-Leader/WKYT Kentucky Poll showed 66 percent disapprove. Only 22 percent approved and 12 percent were not sure.

“That is pretty darn high for disapproval. It’s a little below the worst I’ve ever seen for any state,” said Del Ali, president of Research 2000, an Olney, Md., firm that conducted the May 7-9 telephone poll of 600 Kentuckians who vote regularly in state elections. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Disapproval ratings for state legislatures usually hover around 50 percent, Ali said. “If I were a student coming home from college and had to show my parents my GPA and it was this, I’d throw it in the trash can.”

House Majority Whip Rob Wilkey, D-Scottsville, said he has not seen an approval rating that low for the Kentucky General Assembly, but called it “well deserved.”

Of the final day of this year’s legislative session that produced no resolution on weighty topics such as state pension reform, a road bill and ethics changes, Wilkey said, “There was so much important stuff that was left hanging and here we were messing around with stuff — taking time with things that were of little or no value.”

House Speaker Jody Richards, D-Bowling Green, said he does not quibble with the poll figures but thinks, “Had the Senate taken our budget, ethics bill and pension bill, the view of this last session would have been more positive.”

Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, said he would like to know more about the poll but added, “If you asked me if I were disappointed with the legislature this year, I would say yes.

“Probably every member of the Senate Republican caucus was disappointed, especially that state pension reform was not enacted.”

Williams, who has butted heads politically with Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear, said the governor and university professors have heavily criticized the legislature about the state budget. “That’s a likely factor in the high disapproval rate,” he said. “But I understand that revenue figures for April will show the state doing as well as last year in revenue receipts. If those numbers prove true, maybe a lot of cuts that have been made will be unnecessary.”

The lower disapproval rating last October for the legislature reflects “an optimistic bias” of the public before the legislature met in the first four months of this year, said Don Dugi, political science professor at Transylvania University.

The higher disapproval rating of 66 percent now suggests the public saw little accomplished in the 2008 General Assembly, Dugi said.

He added that polls of job satisfaction with the U.S. Congress usually are low, but are high for individual members of Congress. “I would imagine that most Kentuckians think more highly of their local state legislator than they do the legislature as a whole.”

In the latest poll, more men than women — 69 percent to 63, and more Republicans than Democrats — 73 percent to 61 percent, disapproved of the legislature’s performance. Meanwhile, 64 percent of independents disapproved.

“All of that’s a very high level of dissatisfaction,” said Dugi. “Also, you would expect more Republicans than Democrats to be dissatisfied because a Democratic governor is in office and they don’t see anything being done.”

The poll also asked if the state budget legislators approved this year adequately funds essential government services, such as education and health programs. Fifty-eight percent of the respondents said it did not.

“That number should have been higher,” Dugi said. “If anybody has been reading the paper about various cuts in state programs and the latest news about the state’s bond ratings, the level of discontent with this budget would be higher.”

Concerning the budget, 57 percent of the men responding and 59 percent of the women were not pleased. Among Democrats, 67 percent voiced disapproval, while 47 percent of the Republicans and 61 percent of independents disapproved.

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