Wednesday, August 24, 2011

ThinkProgress: The Mess In Texas — Debunking Rick Perry’s ‘Texas Miracle’


ThinkProgress video
Having only entered the race last week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has already jumped to the top of the GOP presidential field.

Fueling his momentum is the so-called “Texas miracle” — the myth that Perry’s governorship has led Texas to weather the recession better than other states, maintaining a healthy economy and brisk job creation.

According a the video produced by Think Progress, these claims are often built on incomplete analysis, or by cherry picking statistics while overlooking other relevant factors that fill in the full picture, which is a much more mixed and middling economic performance than he and his supporters would like you to believe.

A new national Gallup poll of GOP and GOP-leaning voters shows Romney, who had more than a quarter of the total vote in Gallup's June numbers in the same poll, has fallen to 17 percent, while newly minted candidate Tex. Gov. Rick Perry surges to 29 percent and the lead. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), considered a top contender, falls to fourth with 10 percent, behind Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) at 13 percent. The rest of the field is in single digits.

Public Policy Polling (D) also came out with a national poll of GOP voters on Wednesday, which showed similar results. In that survey, Perry leads with 33 percent in the field of announced candidates, followed by Romney at 20 percent and Bachmann at 16. The rest of the field in that poll were also in single digits.

Both polls showed Perry's favorability ratings are very high among Republican primary voters. Gallup recently published "positive intensity scores" on the GOP field (a metric that measures strong favorability against strong unfavorability), which show Perry as the highest rated of the GOP major contenders, although less known. In the PPP poll, Perry registered a 64 percent favorablility rating against 17 unfavorable, a number that reflected findings in another PPP poll released Tuesday of Iowa GOP voters.


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