ELECTIONATE JULY 17, 2012
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In the wake of last week’s ABC News/Washington Post poll, ABC News reported that Obama has a problem with independent voters. On the one hand, this isn’t surprising. Obama has consolidated the Democratic vote, and yet he remains beneath 50 percent among registered voters; obviously independents aren’t swooning to support the President’s reelection. But does that mean Obama has a problem among independents? That’s a tougher question to answer, and it turns on expectations for eventual partisan turnout, another question that has riled analysts in recent weeks.
In 2008, Obama won independent voters by 6 percentage points, just slightly less than his 7 point national victory. But recent polls show that Obama has lost considerable independent support, falling nearly 10 points from 52 to 42 percent since 2008. (The ABC News/Washington Post poll is clearly on the lower end; other polls showing a narrow Romney advantage with both candidates mired in the low-forties.)
There are hints that the broad category of “independent” obscures Obama's more specific issue with white independent voters. According to Pew Research, Obama leads among independents nationally, but trails by 10 points among white independents, 40-50. Again, this isn’t necessarily a surprising conclusion: Obama is at historic lows among white voters and that entails big losses among white independents.
But Obama’s issue with independents seems to extend a bit further than problems with the entire electorate. Notice that Romney seems to lead among independents even as Obama is tied or ahead in all five polls. There is also evidence that Obama’s approval ratings among independent voters are net-negative. Quinnipiac, for instance, shows Obama’s approval underwater at 40-52, even though Romney has only consolidated 43 percent of the independent vote; this suggests that Romney has an opportunity to consolidate plenty of independent voters with reservations about Obama’s performance.
If Romney secured a majority of independent voters, Obama would need to compensate with a Democratic-leaning electorate. Is that realistic? Yes, to a certain extent: In the 2010 midterms, Democrats and Republicans each represented 35 percent of the electorate; in 2012, higher minority turnout will tilt that number in a Democratic direction, even if not overwhelmingly. Decent Democratic turnout could overcome a modest defeat among independents. For instance, Obama could potentially counter a 6 point deficit with independents in an electorate that leaned 3 points Democratic, but even that scenario only produces a tied election.
So is it useful to say that Obama has an independent problem? A little—it helps clarify the importance of Democratic turnout to Obama’s chances. It also might help explain the behavior of one critical swing state, which I’ll explain in the next post. But Obama’s independent problem isn’t much different than his problem with the electorate as a whole.
2 comments
Independents, being independents, don't have strong ideological preferences, they have egocentric preferences, as in which candidate will do something for me. I would think they would have a problem with Obama because he represents, to them anyway, the status quo, and the status quo is not a good place. Sure, one could argue that Obama has proposed changes from the status quo but they have been blocked by Republicans. My response is how would a second term be any different. Romney's strength with independents is that he offers change, and not having strong ideological preferences, that's good enough for independents.
- rayward
July 18, 2012 at 9:55am
Independents are not a fixed grouping of voters. Rather, they are a set of people who choose to identify themselves as independent to pollsters at a given moment. Why they do so is a political science dissertation in and of itself, but all the evidence shows that about 75-90% of the time an "independent" is a Democratic or Republican partisan who is dissatisfied with the direction of his party at a given moment but obviously not ready to switch his party label all the way. So, in 2006 and 2008, a sizeable number of disillusioned Republicans identified as independents to pollsters, while in 2010 a fair number of disillusioned Democrats did the same. But these were not the same people -- the disillusioned Republican of 2006 was happy enough in 2010 to call himself a Republican to a pollster (and vote accordingly), while the disillusioned Democrat of 2010 was happy enough to call himself a Democrat in 2006 and 2008 (and vote accordingly). And, of course, there are not a lot of people who are Republicans in 2004, independents in 2006, Democrats in 2008 and independents or Republicans in 2010. Having said all this, voters who identify as independent at a given time tend to be dissatisfied with the status quo and look for people to blame. A fair number of them will blame the sitting President, though some may support the President as an individual but be distant from his party and the opposition party. When you layer in race and class, white working class voters who call themselves "independent" tend to be mistrustful of Obama and the broader Democratic Party in general for the reasons Nate Cohn has been dutifully laying out in his blog entries since he started. The catch is not whether these people can be induced to vote for Obama, as clearly many or most cannot or will not short of some kind of thrilling national security win on a par with the Bin Laden killing shortly before Election Day. The catch is whether they will decide that Romney is no better or even worse than Obama, and not vote at all (like the gent in the anti-Bain ad). That's in part what the attacks on Bain are designed to do in the battleground states -- confirm in white working-class voters that, whatever they think of Obama, Romney is even worse and definitely not worthy of their votes. There is little definitive evidence on how well this is working to date, but let's wait a couple of weeks and see what happens.
- wildboy
July 18, 2012 at 10:22am