Group promises to make Social Security an issue in Toomey, McGinty race
While unveiling poll numbers this week that show voters oppose weakening the country’s retirement safety net, a liberal advocacy group vowed to make the protection of Social Security an issue in key U.S. Senate races, including Pennsylvania’s.
“We’re going to get this issue in front of voters in the last seven weeks of this election,” said Brad Woodhouse, president of Americans United for Change. “It’s a critical, critical issue.”
Woodhouse said his group would be launching a “six-figure” campaign in support of Social Security in several states with high-profile Senate races, such as Pennsylvania, where Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey and Democratic challenger Katie McGinty are battling it out.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was also a target of Woodhouse, who called the New York developer “a candidate who cannot go a day without blatantly misleading voters.” Woodhouse said Trump approved a Republican platform with “thinly veiled calls for privatization” of Social Security.
Woodhouse said Republican senators in his group’s sights support privatizing Social Security or drastically reducing benefits. He said the “Hands Off Our Social Security” campaign is meant to thwart a “post-election sneak attack on Social Security” should Republicans keep the House and Senate and win the White House.
The campaign, Woodhouse said, won’t feature TV ads, but will include grassroots efforts such as protests and rallies at senators’ offices to let voters know the GOP senators want to put Social Security “in the hands of their friends on Wall Street.”
Ted Kwong, a Toomey campaign spokesman, responded that Toomey and other Republicans do not want to privatize Social Security and he included in an email several links to stories debunking the charge, such as a PolitiFact report in April calling the allegation “a longstanding Democratic exaggeration.”
Kwong said McGinty and her allies are so “desperate” to obscure her record on taxes that “they are resorting to outlandish lies that have been debunked years ago. Pennsylvania deserves better than higher taxes and baseless lies.”
Most Republican proposals to reform Social Security have called for giving Americans, usually those under 55, the option of investing a portion of their retirement.
Tom Jensen, the director of North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling, said a survey of voters “across party lines” in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Nevada and Wisconsin shows that they are uniformly opposed to privatizing Social Security, reducing benefits or raising the retirement age.
When asked about privatizing Social Security by investing in the stock market, 68 percent of voters opposed it with just 20 percent supporting it. In Pennsylvania, 65 percent opposed it while 25 percent supported it.
Eighty-eight percent of voters opposed cutting Social Security benefits, PPP found, while 5 percent supported that. Pennsylvania had similar results with 87 percent opposing cuts and 8 percent favoring them.
Raising the retirement age was opposed by 62 percent of voter surveyed while 28 percent supported it, but in Pennsylvania opposition was 69 percent and support down to 22 percent.
PPP asked voters if they would be more or less likely to support a candidate who wanted to privatize Social Security. Demonstrating why Democrats want to make this a campaign issue, 63 percent said less likely and 15 percent said more while in Pennsylvania 67 percent said they would be less likely to support such a candidate and 18 percent answered more likely.