Poll: Billy Long's approval rating at 40 percent

(From Jim Evans, Democratic Candidate for Seventh District Congress)

After nearly four years in office, only forty percent of Ozarkers in the Seventh District approve of Congressman Billy Long’s job performance.

This finding, from a survey of 1,079 likely voters conducted by Public Policy Polling on October 7-8, was reinforced by their overwhelming rejection of raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to seventy. They also clearly opposed repealing and replacing Medicare with an Obamacare-like premium subsidy for private insurance scheme.

Long has voted for both of these radical policy changes.

In the survey, seventy-nine percent of respondents opposed raising the age of eligibility and opposed privatization by a margin of forty-nine to thirty-one percent.

Jim Evans has, from the beginning of his campaign, passionately supported the protection and improvement of the Social Security and Medicare benefits earned by the hard work of recipients. He has vigorously opposed turning Social Security over to Wall Street and Medicare over to big insurance companies.

Additionally, these same voters supported, by substantial margin, public education and local control, strongly favored by Jim Evans, over the Koch Brothers/Rex Sinquefield proposals to privatize K-12 schools by vouchers and similar means. Seventy-two percent endorsed the Evans position supporting retention and improvement of public schools.

The demographic profile of the respondents closely matches the composition of the electorate of Southwest Missouri by party affiliation, 2012 Presidential preference, gender, race, and age.

Public Policy Polling is a highly-respected “gold standard” firm, based in North Carolina, whose survey findings are routinely relied upon by campaigns, political analysts, journalists, academics, and the public.