A little over a month ago I took my first in depth look at this year's Presidential election in my blog post, 150 Days and Counting. There are still over 100 days until the election which is an eternity in a political campaign. Political races have dynamics that make predictions this far out a risky proposition. However, in that post I looked at the math and stated that I saw three potential outcomes. A squeaker for Obama, a squeaker for Romney or a comfortable win for Romney.
It is generally conceded that President Obama can not run on his record on win. He also is not going to be able to use his "hope and change" theme of four years ago. The Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index has shown that around 40% of likely voters strongly disapprove of the way President Obama is performing as President. This has been the case pretty consistently for the last three years.
These types of numbers would normally spell doom for an incumbent. However, Obama has stayed even, or even leads, in many polls. How can this be? A big reason is that many people still do not know Mitt Romney. People are slow to turn out an incumbent, Human beings feel more secure with the familiar. It is always a risk to venture away from what you know.
The other factor that has been helping President Obama has been a relatively high favorability rating. People might not approve of the job he has done as President but he has generally been considered a likeable individual. Someone that you would like to have a beer with or have as a guest in your home.
Despite the fact that over most of the last three years more than 40% strongly disapproved of his job performance, he has pretty consistently had more than 50% of voters saying that they have a favorable opinion of the President. You can see all the favorability polling data going back over the last few years via Real Clear Politics. Therefore, this seems to be the key factor underlying President Obama's position in the polls despite his record in office and the poor economy.
With this as background, I was very interested to see the CBS News/NY Times poll of July 11-16 that was released recently. The headline of the poll showed a 47-46 Romney lead. However, the internal data in the poll got my attention.
It showed Obama at a -12 in favorability with only 36% viewing him favorably and 48% viewing him unfavorably. This is also a poll that oversampled Democrats (33%) over Republicans (27%) with 41% stating they were Independents.
In April the same poll showed Obama with a -3 in favorability with 42% favorable and 45% not favorable. That is a pretty significant erosion of support.
Governor Romney also has a net negative favorability rating of -4 in the same poll. 32% view him favorably and 36% have an unfavorable opinion of him. However, while 87% have a firm opinion of Obama only 68% of voters have an opinion about Romney. There still is a significant opportunity to shape this opinion, pro or con, in the coming weeks and months of the campaign.
The interesting thing about these results is that this poll was taken in the same time frame that the Obama campaign stepped up their personal attacks on Romney and Bain Capital. They even suggested that he might be a "felon". Could this indicate that Obama is in a box? He can't run on his record but he also can't attack vigorously attack Romney either or he risks eroding his "favorable" rating that is keeping him above water? Have these attacks on Romney actually hurt Obama more than they hurt Romney?
I saw another interesting data point in this article by Mike Flynn at Breitbart's Big Government.com. Flynn writes about the significance of "undervotes" in uncontested primaries. He provides an analysis of the undervotes in Pennsylvania's Democrat primary when President Obama was uncontested on the ballot as an indicator that he may be in serious trouble in Pennsylvania.
If you recall, President Obama's problems in the Democrat primary were not confined to just a state like Pennsylvania. An inmate in a Texas prison won 41% or the vote against Obama in the West Virginia primary, a little known Tennessee attorney got 42% against him in Arkansas and 42% of Democratic voters checked off "uncommitted" in Kentucky's primary.
One of my first jobs in politics--decades ago--was to analyze the "undervote" in uncontested primaries. An undervote happens when a voter fails to register a vote in a particular primary contest when there is only one candidate on the ballot. In essence, the voter simply skips over the race. It happens either because the voter hasn't heard of that candidate or they have some basic opposition to that candidate. Our general rule of thumb was that a candidate who had more than 10% undervote was in serious trouble. In many counties in the recent Pennsylvania primary, Obama's undervote was 30% or higher.
This map of Pennsylvania shows the "undervote"by county. You can see that the undervote was very small in the heavily Democratic Philadelphia urban counties. However, in Western and Central Pennsylvania the undervotes are huge. These are areas where working class people "cling to guns or religion" as Obama described them in 2008.
Governor Romney needs to close the deal. He needs to better connect with the voters, let them see his heart and mind and better articulate a path forward. If he can do it, President Obama will be a one-term President. It is not written in the stars but the data show the weak foundation on which this President is going to be running this campaign on. His upside appears to be very limited due the high levels of disapproval that have persisted for over three years. However, the downside looms much larger for Obama. Charm can only take you so far.
My advice to President Obama right now? Look out below. Whatever he has built (did he really build it?) has a very weak foundation.
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