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Obama’s Shrinking Electoral Base; Cain “Reassessing” his Campaign

Nov 30, 2011

By Dave Andrusko

Pro-abortion President Barack Obama

As the item I got to last in the day, this deserves more time than I have to spend on it. So I will return to the political fortunes of President Obama again in greater depth tomorrow.

By way of preface, many of you probably already have read or heard that Herman Cain is “re-assessing” his campaign in light of the reports that have come out in the past couple of weeks. Should he withdraw it obviously would shake up the standings of a cadre of pro-life GOP presidential candidates once again. Currently Cain in third in most polls.

Much of the news about President Obama takes its cue from his continuing low poll numbers and an obviously shrinking base of support. For example, putting the best face on it, Gallup’s Lydia Saad today concluded, “President Barack Obama’s job approval rating averaged 43% last week, identical to his rating each week since late October. While more Americans continue to disapprove than approve of the president’s job performance, his recent stretch at 43% approval is a slight improvement over the 40% to 42% readings seen more commonly in the weeks prior.”

But we learn in the very next sentence, “Longer term, Obama’s weekly average approval rating remains depressed relative to the 45% to 50% readings seen for much of the first half of 2011.”

However what poses the greatest threat to his re-election is

“Obama’s approval rating has decreased among all six partisan/ideology groups Gallup tracks on a regular basis since January, but it has dropped the most — 10 percentage points, from 40% to 30% — among pure independents. These are the roughly 14% of national adults who neither identify with one of the two major parties nor indicate a leaning. Obama’s approval rating has declined by nearly as much — eight points — among moderate/liberal Republicans, from 29% to 21%.”

And because it’s obvious that people are either abandoning the ship or at least eye-balling a life-preserver, a great deal of attention was paid to a piece by Thomas Edsall, writing on a New York Times blog. “The Future of the Obama Coalition” ran at http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/the-future-of-the-obama-coalition and was treated as if Obama has concluded it’s time to give up on the white working class.

A much fairer assessment of Edsall’s piece is that those voters have been gradually leaving the Democratic Party for a long, long time. Thus it’s not a matter of preference, but pragmatics that the Obama campaign, according to Edsall, seems to be looking to assemble

“a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.”

Or, as Cliff Zukin, a professor of political science at Rutgers, told Edsall, “My sense is that if the Democrats stopped fishing there [among low-income whites], it is because there are no fish.”

Tomorrow we’ll go into much greater depth and take a look at the media attack dogs that have been unleashed on the two leading pro-life Republican presidential candidates: former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

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Categories: Politics