LANSING – Michigan residents are more optimistic about the economy than they have been in several years, but also are far more pessimistic about state government, figures from the latest survey from the State of the State Survey show.

The survey, conducted of some 2,000 persons in the state, also showed that the number of residents who thought President Barack Obama and Gov. Jennifer Granholm were doing a good job had fallen. In Granholm’s case the percentage of those who said she was doing a good or excellent job fell to nearly the all-time low in the survey’s history.

Charles Ballard, an economics professor at Michigan State University and director of the survey, said that if he were advising the political parties on the basis of the results he would say to Republicans, “Keep hammering away,” and to Democrats, “Get a budget.”

Doug Roberts, director of MSU’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, which oversees the survey, said some of the results in the survey should make some politicians cautious. Overwhelmingly, the respondents said creating jobs and stimulating the economy was the most important problem facing Granholm and the Legislature.

Cutting taxes or cutting the size of government barely registered as problems the state needed to deal with (in fact, being cited by just 0.5 percent of the respondents, reducing the size of government ranked just above dealing with abortion, morality issues and family values at 0.4 percent).

Roberts said of candidates who make cutting taxes their main campaign focus, “unless you can attach it to jobs, it’s not going to resonate. There must be a tie” to improving the economy.

The survey results, particularly the finding of how low public trust was in state government, were immediately trumpeted by Republicans. Former state Republican chair, and current national committee member, Saul Anuzis, immediately posted on his Facebook and Twitter that the poll was evidence of a “tsunami” this November favoring the GOP.

But Michigan Democrats released findings of an earlier study that showed voters were more optimistic about the economy and did not blame Granholm for the economy.

The survey was the latest of the quarterly survey that has been conducted since 1994. Slightly more than half the respondents were women, 52.5 percent; 82.9 percent identified themselves as white while 12.6 percent were black; some 31.2 percent of the respondents said they were Democrats and 23.8 percent said they were Republicans. The survey had an error rate of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points. The survey was conducted in the winter and spring.

A total of 55 percent of those polled said they were worse off than the year before. Bad as those numbers were, they were still an improvement over a year before when more than 67 percent of the respondents said they were worse off.

The survey also found that 47.6 percent of the respondents said their current financial situation was either excellent or good. While that was down significantly from the 64.1 percent who said their financial situation was good in 1998, it was also higher than the 40 percent said their status was good in the winter of 2009.

Ballard said the specific results of the survey were interesting on the question. With a relatively high number of people earning no more than $20,000 a year saying their financial position was good and a large number of respondents who earned more than $70,000 saying their financial position was poor. No one who reported earning more than $150,000 said his or her financial position was poor, Ballard said.

And the number of respondents who thought they would be better off a year from now stood at 50.1 percent. While that was down slightly from the survey of the summer of 2009, it was up from the last survey when 49 percent thought they would be better off in a year’s time.

The respondents were still nervous about the economy, however, with 56.7 percent saying building jobs was the most important issue facing government. Another 12.9 percent said economic growth was the most important issue.

Another 7.3 percent said school funding was the most important while 6.4 percent said education quality was the most important.

In contrast, just 3.2 percent thought the state’s budget was the most important, while cutting taxes was listed by 1.3 percent of the respondents.

But what Ballard called “the big story” in the poll was that confidence in Michigan’s government had fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in the history of the poll.

In fact, Ballard said confidence in state government had fallen almost to the level of confidence in the federal government.

Confidence in state government has never been a big sell with the survey’s respondents, but even so, the drop it has shown has been remarkable. Just 15.9 percent of those questioned said they could trust state government most of the time, and that was down from 20 percent in 2009. At its highest in 2002, about 36.2 percent of the respondents said state government could be trusted most of the time.

In contrast, 37 percent of the respondents said state government rarely or never could be trusted. That was up sharply from the 24.2 percent who felt that way in 2009, and stood at its highest level ever.

Why respondents thought so little of state government was not parsed, Ballard said, but he guessed it would relate to the struggles the state has had with resolving its budget.

It does stand as a significant concern for whoever is elected governor and those elected to the Legislature, Ballard said.

Confidence in both Granholm and Obama were also down, but some of the decline could be expected, Ballard said.

Obama came into office with unusually high approval ratings, nearly 71 percent when he was first sworn in, and that was likely unsustainable.

The number of people who think Obama is doing a good or excellent job is 36.9 percent, down from 44.2 percent in the fall of 2009. Some of that might have come from some of the ongoing political fights he has faced on various issues, Ballard said.

His ratings are still far higher than the approval ratings former President George W. Bush had towards the end of this term, when his approval stood at 17.3 percent.

Those thinking Granholm was doing a good or excellent job fell to 20.8 percent of the respondents, down from 27.2 percent in the last survey and from 34.5 percent in the summer of 2009. Part of the uptick in Granholm’s favorability may have been due to some coattails from Obama, Ballard said.

But it is also not unusual for approval ratings of an incumbent politician to fall dramatically at the end of his or her term, Ballard said. Former governor John Engler’s ratings fell significantly in the last months of his administration, he said.

This story was provided by Gongwer News Service. To subscribe, click on Gongwer.Com

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