Barack Obama cannot, in any way, be said to have white working class support.

Gallup is being a bit, ah, antiseptic on this story: “President Barack Obama’s job approval rating among white non-college graduates is at 27% so far in 2014, 14 percentage points lower than among white college graduates. This is the largest yearly gap between these two groups since Obama took office.”  I say ‘antiseptic’ because it should be spelled out more that Obama’s popularity with college educated white voters dropped remarkably in 2010, and has been slowly degrading ever since; but at the same time Obama’s support among working class whites not only dropped similarly in 2010, it did so again after 2012. In other words, Obama seems to have found a floor when it comes to white college graduate voters; white working class ones, not so much.

I mention all of this solely for one reason: in the run-up to 2016 you are going to hear a lot of college educated white Democratic activists solemnly inform you that [INSERT DEMOCRATIC PARTY CANDIDATE HERE] will be able to craft a populist message that will resonate with working class voters.  They are also going to inform you, just as solemnly, that Barack Obama will not be a drag on the ticket.  This is not a case where both of these things cannot be true; it is more a case that neither is true, but the former is slightly less unbelievable than the latter.  It will be interesting to see which Democratic pundits will be able to comprehend this.

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Moe Lane (crosspost)