Public employees not such an easy scapegoat after all

By Greg Sargent

As the Wisconsin standoff continues, it's worth stepping back and considering an underappreciated but heartening aspect of this whole affair: Public employees are turning out to be far harder to scapegoat in the public mind than many predicted. This was anything but assured. Many commentators expected that conservatives would have an easy time turning Americans against public employees by foisting the blame for our economic woes upon them. Wisconsin is showing that this is turning out not to be so easy, after all.

I've got some new polling from Gallup that underscores this point: It turns out that the only income group that favors Governor Scott Walker's proposal to roll back public employee bargaining rights are those who make over $90,000.

As you know, Gallup released a poll earlier this week finding that 61 percent of Americans oppose Walker's plan, versus only 33 percent who are in favor. It turns out Gallup has crosstabs which give us an income breakdown of that finding, which the firm sent my way:

* Among those who make less than $24,000 annually, 74 percent oppose the proposal, versus only 14 percent who favor it. * Among those who make $24,000 to $59,000, 63 percent oppose the proposal, versus only 33 percent who favor it. * Among those who make $60,000 to $89,000, 53 percent oppose the proposal, versus only 41 percent who favor it. * Among those who make $90,000 and up, 50 percent favor the proposal, versus 47 percent who oppose it.

Only the last, highest-income category favors the proposal; working and low-to-middle class folks all oppose it.

Now, as Mark Blumenthal notes, we need to proceed with caution, because there's not a lot of data available on this topic. But I think it's fair to speculate that the focus of Walker's proposal on rolling back long-accepted bargaining rights, and the massive amount of media attention to it, may have reframed the debate and refocused the public's attention in a way that is undermining the right's previous advantage on questions involving public employees. This isn't to say the right doesn't still have the upper hand in some ways. And Walker very well may win in the end. But the landscape has clearly changed in an unexpected way.



Go back and read Ben Smith's and Maggie Haberman's piece from months ago on the coming assault on public employees -- one of the first of the genre -- and you'll find strong confidence among conservatives about their ability to make "political targets out of what was once a protected liberal class of teachers, cops, and other public servants." Public employees, it was assumed, would make easy scapegoats amid widespread economic woes.

Yet the events in Wisconsin -- and the public reaction to them -- are challenging this assumption in a big way. There's strong consensus among not just most income groups, but even across party lines, that Walker's proposal goes too far. Multiple GOP governors are now backing away from the most onerous of anti-public union proposals.

For all the attention being lavished on the likes of Chris Christie and his supposedly successful formula of targeting public employees as the new "welfare queens," the bigger and more interesting story is that they aren't turning out to be such easy targets, after all.

