The Base Continues To Vanish
Last week I observed that Obama’s real political problem was not the alienation of white men and white independents as some accounts would have it, but rather the disaffection of core Democratic constituencies, which now give Obama dramatically lower approval ratings than they gave him electoral support. Perhaps the administration saw the same thing and went ahead with a final push for health care legislation on the gamble that this would do more to energize their own people than it would provoke resistance. Perhaps if Congress does produce some bill in the near future that gamble will pay off, but in the meantime Obama continues losing ground with self-described liberals.
In 2008, according to CNN’s exit polling 89% of liberals voted for Obama, and now just 73% approve. 67% of those who rarely or never attend church voted for Obama, and now just 52% approve. According to Gallup, conservative approval continues to be higher (27%) than Obama’s share of the conservative vote (20%), and moderate support remains fairly steady. Obama has lost a little ground with Republicans in recent weeks, but this comes entirely from liberal and moderate Republicans (down five points from last week), and the 12% approval is higher than Obama’s share of the Republican vote (9%). His overall approval among Democrats has remained steady over the last couple of months because approval gains among conservative Democrats (up eight points to 75%) keep offsetting losses among liberal Democrats (down five points to 84% this week).
Even when we look at results from the crosstabs of a late February Rasmussen poll of likely voters, we find the same thing. Conservative likely voters are no more inclined to approve of Obama (19%) than conservatives were inclined to vote for him (20%), but he receives just 82% from liberal likely voters, (vs. 89%) 54% from 18-29 year old LVs (vs. 66%), 51% from women LVs (vs. 56%), and 80% from Democrat LVs (vs. 89%). It is difficult to look at this data and conclude that Obama’s political problem has been his lack of “centrism.”
2 Responses to “The Base Continues To Vanish”
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It’s also important to realize how meaningless these numbers are as an indicator of “where Obama has gone wrong”. One can try to Divine certain truths from the demographic tea leaves, but none of them really tell us anything. The true reason why Obama’s numbers are down is that the economy is down, pure and simple. His number were up early on, simply out of hope that he would make things better, and the long slow slide in his popularity is due entirely to his not being able to pull magic white rabbits out of a hat.
That Obama has probably helped prevent a true Depression really doesn’t show up in poll numbers, since people don’t respond to hypotheticals, but only to street realities. The economy may be bottoming, and thus so may Obama’s poll numbers. If the economy makes a genuine recovery, which it might already by on the road to doing. so will Obama’s poll numbers, regardless of what the tea leaf readers see in the poll numbers. But the fact is, this has been a very serious and deep and lasting recession, and that’s going to hurt Obama regardless of his responsibility for it. If there’s a recovery, his poll numbers will increase – again, regardless of his responsibility for it. That’s life in these here states.
It’s important to recall Reagan’s similar drop in the polls in the first two years of his Presidency, when the economy sucked, regardless of whether he was at fault. When the economy recovered and boomed, he got credit for it, and was re-elected in a landslide. Expect a similar course for Obama if the economy recovers into a boom by 2012, which I think is rather likely by then. Then everyone will credit Obama for his political genius, which will make just as little sense as people blaming him for his political misteps now.
It obviously depends how you define “centerism”. If you define it as in the phrase, “the reasonable centre”, then you will find that a very large proportion of people consider themselves as reasonable and therefore as centrists – and when these people disagree with Obama he is, by definition, not a centrist. Thus for neo-cons Obama is not a centrist because he does not appear to favour war with Iran, for Fox News, Obama is not a centrist because he proposes socialistic healthcare reform etc etc. The label centrist, like so many other political terms (fascist and socialist to name only the most obvious) has become entirely subjective and meaningless.