It is now common ask why Obama does not have a larger lead in national polls, and it is reasonable for Democrats to worry about what this means for the autumn given the recent history of Republican polling gains as the election approaches, but the argument that Obama “should” be doing better right now is based in large part on the assumption that the intense anti-GOP mood ought to translate into a landslide victory that Obama is so far “failing” to win.  Of course, he’s still winning and he’s currently projected to improve on his predecessor’s Electoral College tally by 45 votes at the least.  This does not have the makings of another 1932, as some Democrats may have hoped, or even another 1952, as I had long assumed it would because of the unpopularity of Bush and the war, but bears closest resemblance to 1976.  Given the greater, earlier engagement of much of the electorate in this cycle, the increased speed with which most of the electorate has been informed about the candidates and the increase in the sheer amount of electoral coverage online and on cable, it could be that the old, gaudy double-digit Democratic leads that previous nominees used to run up in the summer and proceeded to lose in the autumn (as in ’76 and ’88) are simply never going to happen again.    

There is not that much reason to expect that the presidential coalitions will have changed that much from the kind of polarization and evenly-divided electorate of the past two cycles.  This polarization is structural, for reasons Steve Sailer has made clear, which is confirmed in other ways in The Big Sort.  This is another reason why bipartisanship tends to be strongest in those areas of policy that are least representative of public opinion, since the divergent interests of polarized voting blocs will tend to increase the incentives for not cooperating with the opposing party.  At the same time, the more polarized the electorate is, the greater the importance of pulling in the remaining undecided voters, who are famously the last to start paying close attention to the election, which ensures that the major party candidates will try to minimize any stark differences between them.  Activists may prefer a choice rather than an echo, but electorally it is often less humiliating to be the echo who loses by two or three points rather than the choice that almost two-thirds of the electorate reject.   

What is interesting about this is that Obama’s campaign has gone out of its way to raise expectations about the outcome of this election.  He has sometimes said that the election is not going to be a tied contest with both campaigns fighting over a few voters in the middle in a couple of battleground states, but aside from the number of battleground states being contested that is more or less exactly the general election we are poised to have.  More recently in his controversial “dollar bill” remarks, he has said that no one really thinks the GOP has credible answers for any current challenges, which means that he is barely leading the representative of a party that is entirely bereft of any good policy ideas.  So there has been some encouragement from the campaign that Obama should be doing better than he is, when there is actually little reason why the two major political coalitions should have changed so much to allow Obama to move much beyond Kerry and Gore levels of support. 

Conceivably, a different Democratic nominee might be doing slightly better, and I am still convinced that nominating Obama was a blunder on the Democrats’ part for which we will all end up paying, but the disconcerting thing to realize is that even after eight years filled with illegal warfare, rampant criminality, the authorization of torture and numerous executive abuses of power the nominee of the party primarily responsible for all of this will probably still pull in 47-48% of the vote and maybe more.  Since most of the worst abuses were in the executive, the enduring strength of the Republican presidential coalition is particularly disturbing, since the people who have been held accountable for the administration’s wrongdoing have largely been merely the President’s lackeys and enablers in Congress rather than the authors of these policies.  In November we seem poised to throw out more of the lackeys from their relatively powerless perches in Congress.  Meanwhile, we may end up potentially rewarding one of the biggest enablers of the crimes of this administration with the executive power whose abuse he did little or nothing to challenge.