Breaking: People Who Didn’t Vote For Obama Don’t Approve Of Him
Bigotry cannot explain, however, why Mr Obama’s approval rating among white Americans has fallen since he took office, from roughly 60% to 40%. As the president pointed out in September: “I was actually black before the election.” White voters have changed their view of Mr Obama not because of his skin colour, but because of what he has done—and what he has failed to do—since he took office. And although he is not on the ballot this year, this matters. The less people admire the president, the less likely they are to vote for his party in the mid-terms. ~
LexingtonAccording to CNN’s
national exit poll, 43% of whites and 41% of white men voted for Obama, and this is approximately where his approval among these groups is now. What needs to be explained is what that approximately middle 20% of whites were thinking when they said they approved of Obama when they had not voted for him. Perhaps it was simply goodwill for a new President and relief that our long national nightmare was finally over. Perhaps it was something else. Whatever the reason for this gap between approval and actual voting habits, the fall in Obama’s approval among whites was a function of the broad but extremely shallow base of a lot of those early high approval ratings.
When people point to Obama’s “low” approval numbers among whites, which do indeed hover around 40%, I am unsure what they mean. Give or take a couple of points, whites who disapprove of Obama’s performance are whites who did not vote for him. The genuinely disaffected white independent voter who voted for Obama and has since been scandalized by his agenda is rarer than gold. The whites who did not vote for Obama have also not voted for Democratic nominees for many previous cycles. In other words, the change that needs to be explained is not why McCain-voting whites disapprove of Obama (after all, they wanted the other candidate and almost always vote Republican for President!), but why for a period of several months millions upon millions of McCain-voting whites said that they approved of Obama as he embarked on an agenda they presumably did not support at the polls.
White approval, or lack of it, is very close to white voting in 2008. Democratic House candidates ran slightly ahead of Obama in 2008 with these voters. According to the
national House exit poll, Democratic House candidates received 45% support from whites and 43% support from white men. In Rasmussen’s
generic ballot poll, whites favor Republicans 50-30 with 5% choosing “other” and 14% “unsure.” What seems likely is that most of this undecided and would-be third-party vote will come back to Democrats. 53% of whites backed Republican House candidates last time, and it seems reasonable that roughly that many will back them this year. White 65+ voters backed 2008 Republican House candidates 53-44. They are likely going to do the same thing this year. The difference is that they will make up a larger share of the electorate than they have in the last two cycles. Added to this is the shift among all 65+ voters away from the Democrats and
towards those stalwart Republican champions of unsustainable en lements.
The story of the 2010 elections is not that Obama has been losing that many white voters, because the disapproving whites were mostly never Democratic voters anyway. The story is that the electorate will be disproportionately made up of those groups who had not been voting for Democrats all along, namely whites and specifically whites 65 and older. The GOP’s completely shameless but politically effective defense of the sanc y of Medicare has also managed to pull away other 65+ voters who had been preferring Democratic House candidates by a narrow margin in the last two cycles.
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