Monday, January 14, 2008

BALTIMORE (AP) — The approval rating for Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, dropped to 35 percent after the special General Assembly session in November. And the majority of voters think the tax package passed during the session, called by Mr. O’Malley, is unfair, according to a statewide poll by the Baltimore Sun.

Mr. O’Malley, who took office in the strongly Democrat state last year with 53 percent of the vote, ranked just eight percentage points above President Bush, a Republican, according to the poll.

Polling firm OpinionWorks surveyed 904 likely voters statewide by phone for the Sun from January 6 to 9. The survey has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

“He’s given away all of his political capital on this special session,” OpinionWorks President Steven L. Raabe said. “He probably needed to do it from a policy standpoint, but one could question the manner in which it was done because it has come at a great cost to his ability to lead the state.”

The governor has said that he knew his plan could hurt him politically but that he thought finding a fiscal remedy was unavoidable. Despite the low approval rating, 48 percent of voters polled still view Mr. O’Malley favorably.

High taxes topped 28 percent of voters’ lists of concerns, and 12 percent named taxes as the second most pressing problem. Over the past 10 years, Sun surveys have not shown more than 11 percent of voters listing taxes as a top concern.

About 52 percent said they think the state’s economy is getting worse, a 33-percentage point increase since 2005 and nearly twice as high as any year since 1998.

According to a Fox 5/The Washington Times/Rasmussen Reports poll released last week, Marylanders gave Mr. Bush, a Republican, a 36 percent job-approval rating, compared with 33 percent for Mr. O’Malley. The poll of 500 likely voters had a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.

Mr. O’Malley’s approval rating slipped one percentage point from October, before he called lawmakers back to Annapolis for the special session, in which $1.4 billion in tax increases were approved. He called the special session to head off a projected $1.7 billion shortfall. But he also increased spending on transportation, health care and the environment, dependent on the outcome of a referendum on slot-machine gambling.

Setting aside their personal feelings, 51 percent said the tax increases were unfair, compared with 33 percent who said the package was fair.

His changes were aimed at “working families,” but the governor’s approval rating among voters without a college degree dropped into the 20s.

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