Tag: voters

Quote of the Day, ‘Monolith’ Actually Is The Best Word For Black Voting Patterns, Alas edition.

I dunno whether April Reign of Ebony is raising a warning flag here, or just spitting into the wind.

Some potential Black Democratic voters have indicated that, while they will support Hillary Clinton should she become the eventual nominee in 2016, it will not be with the same fervor as they did for President Obama, in part because of a sense of bad blood experienced during the 2008 campaign.  Indeed, many Blacks are saying that Hillary Clinton is not their first choice to receive the Democratic nomination in 2016 and that they will be anxiously waiting to see whom else enters the race.  These sentiments must not go unchecked by Hillary for America because Black voters, while not a monolith, are a large constituency that must be courted by Democrats to win the presidency. There is a sense of entitlement that Hillary Clinton has not earned within the Black community, allowing her supporters to mistakenly take Black votes for granted. Hillary Clinton will have to earn our support and our votes just as any other candidate does.

Continue reading Quote of the Day, ‘Monolith’ Actually Is The Best Word For Black Voting Patterns, Alas edition.

AP-GfK: 9% of voters enthusiastic about Barack Obama.

Ouch.

[A recent] AP-GfK poll asked the approve/disapprove question, finding 17 percent of likely voters said they strongly approve of Obama and 44 percent strongly disapprove. But then it asked a separate — and we would argue, more enlightening — question about the Obama administration. It asked how people felt about it, and gave them four options: “enthusiastic,” “satisfied but not enthusiastic,” “dissatisfied but not angry,” and “angry.”

That would seem to be a pretty good analogue for the approve/disapprove question, but the answers are quite a bit different. While 17 percent of likely voters “strongly approve” of Obama, just 9 percent say they are “enthusiastic” about his administration.

Continue reading AP-GfK: 9% of voters enthusiastic about Barack Obama.

#rsrh QotD, The Answer’s Not Obvious? edition.

David Paul Khun, in the course of writing a reasonably clear-headed analysis of the 2012 Democratic electorate (and why the Democrats are messing it up):

America is the only Western nation where the liberal party consistently loses the workingman (and woman). No comparable European democracy has seen the conservative party unfailingly win the Archies and Ediths for more than three decades. Now Democrats seem to be on the verge of resigning themselves to this trend.

There are myriad macro reasons for this exceptional fact of American politics: a center-right nation, the two-party system, the modern contest for identity blocs, the unusual eminence of cultural issues in American politics on both the right and the left.

It also doesn’t precisely hurt that, by and large, the Democratic Establishment kind of publicly loathes and despises middle and lower class white voters.

Well, it doesn’t precisely hurt us.

Gallup: Obama slips with African-Americans, Hispanics…

…unexpectedly.

Gallup mentions the most obvious point – the President has slipped from his historical approval rating among African-Americans (usually around 92%) all the way down to 85%* – but it kind of obscures a detail on the graph with regard to Hispanic voters. They acknowledge that the President is currently at a low with 54% of those voters, but Gallup does not point out that Obama’s approval rating dropped by double digits with those voters over a year ago and hasn’t really come back since. For that matter, the real story from that graph is that the President has a 39% approval rating among whites; his approval rating among those voters at the beginning of his term was somewhere just above 60%.

Andrew Malcolm is right to couch all of this in terms of it merely being worrisome for the President; after all, it’s early days yet. But he’s also right that Obama should be worrying about this, given that hyper-enthusiasm is precisely what his campaign needs if they seriously plan to raise a billion dollars for the 2012 campaign. In fact, i think that the billion-dollar number is going to end up being a bit of an albatross for the President: it will require a constant, probably grueling, emphasis on fundraising in order to work, and it has already forced the President to formally re-enter the electoral arena months early. In other words, the President may have been better off if he had decided not to try to beat his high score. Continue reading Gallup: Obama slips with African-Americans, Hispanics…