talkpolitics | Obama's Uphill Battle: A Continuing Series

badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com posting in

With Rick Santorum out of the race, we're starting to see things coming together. And by "things" I mean "Republican voters," and by "coming together," I mean "unifying behind a candidate." Gallup started its daily tracking this week, and 90% of Republicans are behind Romney now, mirroring the 90% of Democrats behind Obama up to this point. The overall poll has Romney +4 among registered voters, which means (if history is an indicator) that Romney is even better among likely voters. This polling holds up, as well - Rasmussen's daily tracker of likely voters has Romney +4, CBS/NYT polling of registered voters has a tie, so this isn't a surprise. There is an outlier poll of CNN which samples Democrats at +11, something that didn't even happen in 2008, but the post-primary polling is essentially nothing but good news for Romney, especially given the predictions by some that the party wouldn't unify.

Also telling? Gallup is showing a commanding lead for Romney among independents, a key political group this go 'round, and one many thought Romney would struggle with. Gallup's poll shows Romney +4 with 12% undecided - there's little reason for the majority of that 12% to break toward Obama at this stage.

One thing that Obama does have going for him currently is his continued advantage among women voters. It's not clear as to whether it's based on the contraceptive mandate, given most voters in the same poll don't even know where Romney stands on the matter, but more based on the media harping on the topic du jour 7 months out. Ramesh Ponnuru details a good point regarding the perception of the female vote:

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post recently fell prey to this conventional wisdom, writing that “the GOP has suffered from a gender gap in every presidential election since 1980.” Suffered? Of the eight presidential elections from 1980 to 2008, Republicans won five (four if you exclude 2000). Republicans carried women, albeit narrowly, three times; Democrats carried men twice. Republicans can lose even while winning men, as in 1996. Democrats can lose while winning women, as in 2004.

The evidence suggests that women are more inclined than men to vote for Democrats, but this gap doesn’t consistently help either party. It isn’t the case that the larger the gender gap, the worse Republicans do. Republicans did seven points better among men than women in 2004, when they won. They did five points better in 2008, when they lost.

It's unlikely to come down to whatever the Democrats decide to throw at Mitt Romney on social issues anyway, however: Pew's survey of registered voters took a look at what voters care about, and the top four responses are the economy, jobs, budget deficit, and health care - none of which are winning issues for Obama currently thanks to the economic news, the ballooning debt, and the Supreme Court hearings. The bottom three issues? Gay marriage, birth control, and abortion - two of which are issues that Obama and the Democrats have been pummeling the Republicans on. Granted, with Obama's record on the top issues, it's in his best interests to place the focus on something else, but to have such a sustained focus on the issues the electorate cares about the least?

And yes, the economy is looking ragged. The March jobs report was slow, after a few good months that even had me believing we might be out of the woods. Manufacturing production and housing? Also down. With gas prices still rising, things aren't looking great economically right now, and the economy is the one thing Obama really needed to turn around for the sake of his reelect numbers.

The only data point we're missing currently is state-by-state breakdowns. A lot of the polling is old, especially for key swing states such as Pennsylvania, and the old polling doesn't reflect the party unity that the Republicans are now enjoying. Those numbers have been shown to be good for Obama, but required a wait-and-see approach with the split GOP field in mind. We do, however, have Rasmussen's generic Congressional ballot, which shows a 10 point lead for Republicans among likely voters. If the GOP is in dire straits on a whole, if the brand is wounded or slowed following the massive 2010 gains, that is not being reflected in the polling currently, and we might actually see some further improvements in their numbers beyond regaining the Senate.