Tagged: polls

A new poll shows a slim majority of Michiganders support natural gas fracking, though they want the industry to face more regulations and pay more taxes.

Michigan’s natural gas industry has grown as companies have used a technique called Hydraulic Fracturing, or fracking, to break up shale deposits releasing natural gas.

Critics complain fracking is contaminating drinking water and causing other environmental problems.

Republicans are hoping to put Michigan's Electoral College votes back in play with $3.7 million worth of TV ad buys in the state as the campaign heads into its final week.

As the Detroit Free Press reports, the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity announced an ad buy of $1.5 million Tuesday, while the Super PAC Restore Our Future has purchased $2.2 million of air time.

A poll released yesterday by EPIC-MRA of Lansing shows the presidential race tightening in Michigan.

Aided by a strong debate performance, Mitt Romney has reduced President Barack Obama’s ten point lead to just three points—within the margin of error for the poll reports the Detroit Free Press.

From the Free Press:

A recent poll of likely voters by Lansing-based Marketing Resource Group has President Barack Obama and Senator Debbie Stabenow maintaining slim leads in Michigan.

MLive has the story:

Michigan's female delegates to the Republican National Convention not surprisingly give high marks to Ann Romney for her speech last night.

Now the focus shifts to her husband Mitt, to see if he can build support among women voters.

The other day, I told my significant other she should plan to be out of town on election day. “Was it something I said?" she asked. Well, no. It’s the way election law works in Michigan. We may all face a ballot that is as long as the proverbial bed sheet.

Not only are there a vast number of candidates and races, we could be asked to decide on four, eight, possibly 11 different complicated ballot proposals. Do you know what would happen if every voter stayed in the booth till she or he managed to figure all this out? We’d all still be in line in four years.

Naturally, nobody does that. So people either skip the proposals or take uninformed guesses. In the case of judicial candidates, too many of us go for familiar or judicial-sounding names, which is why there are a lot of judges named Kelly.

We also, oddly enough, elect trustees of our three biggest universities, and what’s even more bizarre, elect them on a partisan basis. Since almost nobody has ever heard of any of these folks, the winners tend to be of the party that wins the top of the ticket.

Governor Rick Snyder’s approval rating has taken a tumble.  Michigan State University’s ‘State of the State Survey’ recently polled more than 900 Michiganders.   The survey found the governor’s approval rating fell from 44% in March to 31% today.  

Charles Ballard heads the survey.   He says the poll’s results are not surprising, given the state of the economy and the governor’s push to cut state spending and restructure Michigan’s tax system. 

After seeing lawmakers cut their funding and give financial managers sweeping new powers, half of local government leaders say they think Michigan is on the wrong track while a third saying it's headed in the right direction.

The survey released Thursday by The Center for Local, State and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan also shows 37 percent give Gov. Rick Snyder a positive job rating while just 21 percent give that rating to the Legislature.

Eighty-six percent say their own governments are going in the right direction.

The biannual survey was conducted from April 18 to June 10 and is based on responses from 69 percent of the 1,856 local government units in Michigan. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

LANSING, Mich. (AP) - A poll finds that President Barack Obama's favorability rating rose among Michigan voters after Osama bin Laden's death.

The poll, however, finds that most state voters are unhappy with how he's handling the economy.

The EPIC-MRA poll released Tuesday showed 53 percent of 600 likely voters polled May 9-11 had a favorable opinion of the Democratic president, up 9 points since February. Forty percent had an unfavorable opinion and 7 percent were undecided.

A third gave him a positive job rating on handling the economy, while 66 percent gave him a negative rating and 2 percent were undecided.

Half gave Obama a positive job rating for conducting foreign affairs and waging the war in Afghanistan.

The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.