“An Alarming Trend For The White House”: Independents Desert Obama – “Especially In Key States”

Jul 9, 2009 16 Comments ›› Pat Dollard

Politico:

In a potentially alarming trend for the White House, independent voters are deserting President Barack Obama nationally and especially in key swing states, recent polls suggest.

Obama’s job approval rating hit a — still healthy — low of 56 percent in the Gallup Poll on Wednesday. And pollsters are debating whether Obama’s expansive and expensive policy proposals or the ground-level realities of a still-faltering economy are driving the falling numbers.

But a source of the shift appears to be independent voters, who seem to be responding to Republican complaints of excessive spending and government control.

“This is a huge sea change that is playing itself out in American politics,” said Democratic pollster Doug Schoen. “Independents who had become effectively operational Democrats in 2006 and 2008 are now up for grabs and are trending Republican.

“They’re saying, ‘Costing too much, no results, see the downside, not sure of the upside,’” he said.

The White House denies there’s been any real shift.

“The independent numbers I have seen, public and private, have been relatively steady,” Obama’s senior political adviser, David Axelrod, said in an e-mail.

Another political adviser dismissed small state polls as statistically questionable and pointed out that Obama’s own numbers remain strong, by historical standards — with an average 59 percent approval rating among independents in June, according to Gallup.

Pollsters from both parties debate the numbers’ meaning, but averages of public polls have shown a gentle downward trend.

Obama retains extremely strong support from Democrats, and earlier this year lost much of the Republican support that followed a giddy Inauguration. It is the independents who appear to be currently on the move: Obama dropped 6 percentage points last week from the week before in Gallup’s tracking poll, and Quinnipiac University found a 5-percentage-point drop in approval from independents between early June and early July. Recent state polling shows drops over longer periods.

A Quinnipiac University poll of voters in economically troubled Ohio, released Tuesday, showed Obama’s approval rating slipping 8 points, to below 50 percent, from a poll two months earlier, with a plurality of 48 percent of independent voters disapproving of his job performance. A Public Policy Polling survey in Virginia found Obama’s approval and disapproval numbers effectively tied, with independents disapproving of the president’s job performance, 52 percent to 38 percent.

“That is fairly consistent with all our polling around the country — Obama tends to be really well-liked personally, but he’s starting to lose a majority of the independents,” said Public Policy’s Dean Debnam. Democrats have “had long enough in some voters’ minds that they’re getting blame for nothing happening, and Republicans are scaring them around health care and tax increases.”

Pollsters differ on the degree to which the independents’ migration is driven by Obama’s policies, rather than the broader economic downturn. “Local politics is local politics, and I don’t see an awful lot of spillover from D.C. into the state races,” said Debnam.

And Obama, of course, isn’t up for reelection anytime soon, and even nervous Democratic congressmen can keep their fingers crossed for economic recovery over the next year.

“It’s been more or less inevitable that we’re going to see some decline in numbers for Democrats,” said Mark Mellman, another Democratic pollster. “For most folks, there’s not an election until 2010, and most economists suggest that by the time we get to 2010, we’re going to see the beginnings of an uptick in the economy.”

Republicans, however, see a longer-term opportunity, and congressional leaders like Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) have for months been laying the groundwork for an argument that Obama’s policies are both expensive and ineffectual — an argument that will have powerful sway as long as voters don’t feel a recovery.

The canaries in the Democratic coal mine, however, may be this year’s top candidates: Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who trails Republican Chris Christie in polls, and Virginia Democrat Creigh Deeds, who trailed Republican Bob McDonnell overall in this week’s Public Policy survey, and by a whopping 21 percentage points among independents.

In both races, local and national issues will be hard to disentangle — but McDonnell, particularly, is trying to turn the tables on Democratic candidates who in recent years tried to make every race a referendum on George W. Bush’s presidency.

“A lot of issues, such as cap and trade and card check, are really resonating with Virginia voters, and what they see is Bob McDonnell clearly articulating his opposition to them, and Creigh Deeds is silent, which is basically supporting them,” said McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin.

McDonnell’s campaign sees particular potential in the coal-rich western part of the state, whose industry could suffer from policies aimed at shifting the country away from fossil fuels.

A Deeds spokesman, Jared Leopold, stressed his candidate’s commitment to state issues and said Deeds doesn’t have a position on the cap-and-trade bill.

“As things are being worked out in the House and Senate, he’s not going to deal with which version of a 1,200-page bill is up,” Leopold said.

Furthermore, he noted, despite some signs of Democratic weak spots, the opposition is even less popular on key issues.

“The national Republican brand is not in good shape,” Leopold said.

Still, Republican analysts said they see the beginnings of an opportunity to use White House policies — if not Obama himself — against Democratic candidates this year and next.

“What’s happening now is that as these issues get debated more and more and as their fiscal implications become more and more clear, independents are starting to side more with Republicans than Democrats,” said pollster Whit Ayres.

Another Republican pollster, John McLaughlin, pointed to his own surveys in January and May asking whether voters would prefer their members of Congress to “help Barack Obama pass his agenda” or to be a “check and balance to Barack Obama.”

The May survey found a majority favoring the check and balance, marking a 17-point shift from January, a shift the pollster said was driven in large part by independents.

For Democratic candidates in New Jersey and, in particular, Virginia, the affections of independents may be linked to those voters’ perceptions of the White House.

“We are seeing it in Virginia and New Jersey and around the country — independents are behaving like Republicans again on certain issues, and it’s because Democrats’ policy seems to be at odds with where people are — and if they don’t work, they’re really going to be at odds,” McLaughlin said.

Independent voters, it appears, now need to feel tangible evidence that Obama’s policies work. Rhetoric is no longer enough.

“If you see unemployment keep rising or doesn’t go down, you’re going to see those independents continuing to shift,” McLaughlin said.