Monday Clips

Monday Clips

After skipping Friday and the weekend, TheIowaRepublican resumes its polling series with a look at the Supreme Court judges:

When participants of the poll were asked if they would vote to retain the three justices or vote against them, 40 percent said retain, while 27 percent would vote against retaining. Thirty-one percent of those polled didn’t know how they would vote.

The Battleground polls also asked those surveyed if they would retain the three Iowa Supreme Court Justices if they knew that these judges voted to legalize gay marriage in Iowa. When the question was asked that way, 44 percent would vote to retain, while 47 percent of respondents would vote to remove the judges. Only eight percent of those surveyed were undecided.

The poll was in the field two weeks ago, and the past two weeks have seen the Prop 8 ruling AND the Vander Plaats No on Judges launch. (I stick by my Friday analysis: if No is associated with BVP and his wing of the GOP, it hurts No more than it helps.) And the push nature of the followup question makes the whole thing a bit dubious.

Nate Silver thinks marriage equality has lost some of its conservative resonance - not that that's a good thing:

Congratulations, gays! You're no longer the dweebiest kid on the playground. Republicans will be beating up on Manuel, whose parents just moved here from Mexico, instead. And when they get done with him, there's Faisal, whose father wants to build a mosque. At best, you're third in the pecking order. You're not even on the short list any more, frankly. But don't get too full of yourselves. If the economy improves, you could be facing another round of noogies and swirlies all over again.

And at Kos, brooklynbadboy argues:

What people want, more than anything else, is for the government to be effective. I can't emphasize this enough. Keep in mind, when this survey talks about effectiveness, it isn't talking about the Washington definition of effectiveness. Washington says you're effective if you pass and sign a bill. Washington says you're effective if you get good poll numbers. This survey indicates that the American people, God bless 'em, believe effectiveness means actually solving problems.