Democratic pollster Pia Nargundkar said Friday that Democrats are falsely portrayed as not wanting to cut spending.
“Absolutely. Democrats get falsely portrayed as they are wasteful spending,” Nargundkar, senior associate at ALG Research, told Hill.TV’s Jamal Simmons on “What America’s Thinking” when asked if Democrats are interested in reducing spending.
“Everyone wants to cut the waste in the budget. What is that waste of course? The Trump tax cut was supposed to help the deficit, and voters are now saying that no, they’re not seeing any difference in their paycheck, and it’s adding to the deficit, so that’s something that we could have done without,” she continued.
A new American Barometer poll, conducted by Hill.TV and the HarrisX polling company found that 82 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of Democrats, and 77 percent of independents said Congress should deal with the deficit by cutting spending.
The poll also found 73 percent of registered voters thought Congress should tackle the deficit by cutting spending.
“[In] that question there was such a big gap between cutting spending and raising taxes. I think that’s a bit of a false dichotomy,” Nargundkar said referring to the poll.
“We disagree on what we want to cut spending [on], but also voters are self-interested, they don’t want to raise their own taxes, of course,” she continued.
“Now if that question had been proposed instead [as] ‘do you want to cut spending on Medicare and Social Security?’ Or ‘do you think the rich should pay their own fair share of taxes, we’d see very different results.”
— Julia Manchester
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