The Obama administration has cut taxes for middle-class Americans, has watched the economy grow over the past two years and expects to make a profit on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on bank bailouts, but only one in two voters believes those things are true.

That’s according to a national poll conducted for Bloomberg by Des Moines-based Seltzer & Co. Inc.

The Obama administration has cut taxes by $240 billion since it took office on Jan. 20, 2009, and took other measures aimed at lowering the burden for 95 percent of working Americans by $116 billion, Bloomberg reported.

But the poll shows that the message hasn’t gotten through.

“The public view of the economy is at odds with the facts, and the blame has to go to the Democrats,” said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer. “It does not matter much if you make change, if you do not communicate change.”

Consequently, Democrats heading into the midterm elections may be at a disadvantage.

Women are slightly more doubtful than men that the $245 billion spent on the Wall Street bank bailout part of the of the rescue will be recovered, the poll showed, and 60 percent of overall respondents say they believe most of the Troubled Asset Relief Program money to the banks is lost.

Even Democrats are skeptical, with 48 percent saying the money will be lost, compared with 41 percent who say it will be recovered.

Likely voters also don’t think the economy is improving, which puts them at odds with data that says the recession officially ended in June 2009 and that the economy has grown 3 percent in the past year.

Sixty-one percent of poll respondents said they believe the economy is shrinking this year.
According to Bruce Oppenheimer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, the high national unemployment rate of 9.5 percent or above during the past 14 months is not helping.

“It spreads a dark cloud across anything else that you’re doing,” Oppenheimer said. “This won’t be a good election for Democrats.”