Last week I posted about how Michigan’s Republican governor Rick Snyder and the Republican majority in the state legislature pushed through anti-union “right to work” laws.
Conservatives, among them George Will, celebrated what they considered a milestone in their efforts to weaken or destroy organized labor.
Now Public Policy Polling reports:
Just last month when we took a first look at the 2014 landscape we talked about how much Rick Snyder had improved his popularity during his second year in office and how he led a generic Democrat for reelection by 6 points, even as Barack Obama won the state comfortably.
Last week he threw all that out the window.
We now find Snyder as one of the most unpopular Governors in the country. Only 38% of voters approve of him to 56% who disapprove. There are only 2 other sitting Governors we’ve polled on who have a worse net approval rating than Snyder’s -18. He’s dropped a net 28 points from our last poll on him, the weekend before the election, when he was at a +10 spread (47/37).
There’s not much doubt that it’s the right to work law and his embrace of other actions by the Republican legislature that are driving this precipitous drop in Snyder’s popularity. Only 41% of voters in the state support the right to work legislation, while 51% are opposed to it. If voters got to decide the issue directly only 40% of them say they would vote to keep the law enacted, while 49% would vote to overturn it. This comes on the heels of voters overturning Snyder’s signature emergency managers law last month. The simple reality is that Michigan voters like unions- 52% have a favorable opinion of them to only 33% with a negative one.
…..
The Republicans in the legislature are even more unpopular than Snyder after their spate of last minute legislation.Only 31% of voters have a favorable opinion of them to 58% with an unfavorable one. Democrats lead the generic legislative ballot in the state by an amazing 56/32 margin, one of the most lopsided generic ballots we’ve ever seen in any state.
I wrote last week:
[I] can predict one thing: Republicans haven’t put this issue to rest. They’ve pissed off a lot of people who otherwise might have remained politically apathetic and uninvolved. It’s game on.
