The Winston Group

Today’s LA Times released a story on the looming federal spending cuts, and how neither Republicans nor the White House backed down on their solutions to address the nation’s budget problem. The Winston Group’s David Winston commented in the story:

“Republicans are saying: We need to put the cuts on the board,” said GOP strategist David Winston, who is close to the House Republican leadership. “We need to start talking about how we deal with this spending problem.”

To read the full article, turn to latimes.com.

The budget debate continues, this time touching on the possibility cuts affecting civilian employees of the Pentagon, who face a sequester that would force them to take one day off a week without pay. The WG’s David Winston commented in the story:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In today’s AP, David Winston comments on President Obama’s efforts to appeal to the public on his economic plan. Winston states that the president will need to take two things into consideration:

David Winston, a Republican pollster and strategist who advises House Republicans, said the key to a successful policy campaign is two-fold.

“The first and central is how important is solving whatever problem is being defined,” he said. “The second one is does the defined benefit solve the problem.”

He argues that even though Obama in 2010 won the health care fight in a partisan showdown, the public didn’t judge health care to be as important as dealing with the economy. As a result, Republicans won control of the House in elections that year.

To read the full article, click to ap.org

Over on U.S. News and World Report‘s Thomas Jefferson Street politics blog, I have a post today urging Republicans to stand strong on the sequester:

There is simply no reason for the GOP to accept “additional revenue,” Democrats’ cutesy euphemism for higher taxes, now. Spending cuts are coming. The president can work across the aisle to target those cuts more carefully, but he cannot force his opposition to trade them away for something they don’t want. Unlike with the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, allowing current law to go into effect does not produce an unacceptable outcome for Republicans. Cuts from a scalpel may be preferable to cuts from a machete, but when you’re $16 trillion in debt, cuts from any instrument beat none at all.

Click here to read the full article.

In today’s Real Clear Politics, Caitlin Huey-Burns writes about the issue of President Obama and Speaker John Boehner having difficulty working together to solve the nation’s fiscal problems. David Winston gave his thoughts on Obama:

“Prior to this president, no president had ever run a deficit over a trillion dollars,” says David Winston, a veteran pollster for House Republicans. “[Obama’s] negative impact on the economy is his Achilles’ heel.”

To read the full article, turn to realclearpolitics.com.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein writes about recent poll numbers for President Obama and Mitt Romney, turning to David Winston for some insight into why Romney’s numbers are good now, but may not lead to a victory in November:

Another argument I heard was that with the polls this close, the election really comes down to turnout. “The number of variables in terms of turnout that still exist are major,” e-mailed David Winston, director of the Winston Group. “Party ID, minority composition, younger voters [all] make it more complicated to assess.’

To read the full article, turn to washingtonpost.com.