Voter Support for the Occupy Movement? Part 2

Well, at long last, we have a national poll that gives us our first good glimpse at what support this Occupy movement has gained, now five weeks into the movement's existence. The poll is question was carried out by the Associated Press-GfK, in which they asked 1,000 adults between October 13-17.

The results of the poll are that 37% of those polled said they support the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I think is a pretty fair number considering the relatively young age of this movement (just 5 weeks or so old). More importantly, the poll also gave us a ideological breakdown of the supporters of this movement.

Not surprisingly, (to me anyway), 64% of the OWS supporters identified themselves as Democrats, 22% identified themselves as Independents, and 14% identified themselves as Republicans. While the numbers for Democrats and Independents didn't surprise me much, the number of identified Republicans in the poll did.

Some other useful date from this poll includes the following:

1. 68% of respondents agreed that former President Bush deserves "almost all" or "a lot but not all" the blame for the current economic downturn.
2. 15% of respondents agreed that President Obama deserves the blame for the current economic downturn.
3. Nearly 6 in 10 respondents blame Congressional Republicans for the current economic downturn.
4. 60% of respondents Democrats more than Republicans to create jobs

NOTE: the numbers above are a breakdown of those who DO support the OWS, not the total number of respondents.

As suggested by the above note, this poll didn't focus on the OWS alone and covered A LOT of ground, too much for me to discuss in full in this post so I decided to focus just on the OWS relevant numbers.

Now while these numbers are the first good glimpse of what kind of support the OWS has to date, as always this is just ONE poll, and one poll does not make a trend. We will need more polls in the near future to be able to safely gauge what kind of support this movement really has with the average American, but my thanks to the AP and GfK for providing us with some initial numbers.

Here are the two main links for this article. One is discussing the OWS aspect of the poll, the other about the full and entire poll done by the AP-GfK:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_AP_POLL_WALL_STREET_PROTESTS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-10-21-13-37-33

http://ap-gfkpoll.com/uncategorized/latest-ap-gfk-poll-findings

Disclaimer:

The views expressed in this work as solely those of the author and not that of the Modern Whig Party or any other political organization.