Memo to the GOP: Independent Voters Are Required to Win the General Election
by Charlie Cook
The National Journal
Updated: August 19, 2011 | 11:30 a.m.
August 19, 2011 | 6:00 a.m.
The 2012 presidential election is shaping up to be one of oddest in memory and potentially far more dramatic than one might guess. Obviously, the general election is still more than 14 months away -- and, in politics, and for that matter anything involving human behavior, predictions are dangerous. But the dynamics that seem to be emerging are fascinating.
On one hand, we have an incumbent president with dismally low job-approval ratings; his signature legislative accomplishment of health care reform remains very unpopular, and he is presiding over an enormously weak and worsening economy. This is a combination sufficiently bad to prevent any president's reelection.
On the other hand, we have an opposing party whose center of gravity and energy levels have swung so far to one side of the ideological spectrum as to have been designed to alienate the independent and swing voters, the people who will effectively decide this presidential election. To put it more simply, this election is the Republican Party’s to lose, and yet, they may pull it off, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
It’s hard to argue with the proposition that President Obama is extremely weak heading into his reelection campaign. Though presidential job-approval ratings don’t begin taking on predictive value until about a year before the actual election, his 40 percent Gallup job-approval rating for the week ending July 14, with 52 percent disapproving, is not good. Although 74 percent of Democrats approve the job he is doing, among independent voters, a group he carried by 8 percentage points in 2008, just 36 percent approve; among Republicans, only 9 percent approve.
(More here.)
The National Journal
Updated: August 19, 2011 | 11:30 a.m.
August 19, 2011 | 6:00 a.m.
The 2012 presidential election is shaping up to be one of oddest in memory and potentially far more dramatic than one might guess. Obviously, the general election is still more than 14 months away -- and, in politics, and for that matter anything involving human behavior, predictions are dangerous. But the dynamics that seem to be emerging are fascinating.
On one hand, we have an incumbent president with dismally low job-approval ratings; his signature legislative accomplishment of health care reform remains very unpopular, and he is presiding over an enormously weak and worsening economy. This is a combination sufficiently bad to prevent any president's reelection.
On the other hand, we have an opposing party whose center of gravity and energy levels have swung so far to one side of the ideological spectrum as to have been designed to alienate the independent and swing voters, the people who will effectively decide this presidential election. To put it more simply, this election is the Republican Party’s to lose, and yet, they may pull it off, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
It’s hard to argue with the proposition that President Obama is extremely weak heading into his reelection campaign. Though presidential job-approval ratings don’t begin taking on predictive value until about a year before the actual election, his 40 percent Gallup job-approval rating for the week ending July 14, with 52 percent disapproving, is not good. Although 74 percent of Democrats approve the job he is doing, among independent voters, a group he carried by 8 percentage points in 2008, just 36 percent approve; among Republicans, only 9 percent approve.
(More here.)
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