Poll: Americans favor Obama's jobs plan

PRINCETON, N.J., Sept. 15 (UPI) -- A plurality of Americans said they favor some sort of jobs plan similar to President Obama's American Jobs Act of 2011, Gallup reported.

By a 45 percent-to-32 percent tally, more Americans want their member of Congress to vote in favor of a jobs bill similar to the one Obama proposed last week instead of against a jobs bill, results released Wednesday indicated. The rest of the people surveyed expressed no opinion.

Obama proposed the "American Jobs Act of 2011" last week during a joint session of Congress and sent the bill to Capitol Hill Monday.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced the bill in the Senate, but a companion bill has yet to be introduced in the House.

While less than half of all Americans favor passage of a jobs bill similar to Obama's, a solid majority -- 57 percent -- of Americans who told Gallup they were following the bill very closely want to see it passed.

Those who told the Princeton, N.J., polling agency they are not following the bill too closely tended to favor the bill's passage, 43 percent to 26 percent.

The Gallup survey describes the bill as "similar to the one President Obama has proposed," so it wasn't surprising that self-identified Democrats strongly support it, while self-identified Republicans oppose it. Those results, combined with independents' greater likelihood to favor rather than oppose the bill, led to the overall 45 percent-to-32 percent slant in support among all Americans, Gallup said.

Results are based on nationwide telephone interviews with 1,010 adults conducted as part of the Gallup Daily tracking survey Monday and Tuesday. The margin of error is 4 percentage points.