In a potentially alarming trend for the White House, independent voters are deserting President Barack Obama nationally and especially in key swing states, recent polls suggest.
Obama’s job approval rating hit a – still healthy – low of 56 percent in the Gallup Poll on Wednesday. And pollsters are debating whether Obama’s expansive and expensive policy proposals or the ground-level realities of a still-faltering economy are driving the falling numbers.
But a source of the shift appears to be independent voters, who seem to be responding to Republican complaints of excessive spending and government control.
“This is a huge sea change that is playing itself out in American politics,” said Democratic pollster Doug Schoen. “Independents who had become effectively operational Democrats in 2006 and 2008 are now up for grabs and are trending Republican.
“They’re saying, ‘Costing too much, no results, see the downside, not sure of the upside,’” he said.
The White House denies there’s been any real shift.
“The independent numbers I have seen, public and private, have been relatively steady,” Obama’s senior political adviser, David Axelrod, said in an e-mail.
That last quote is telling. Axelrod is worried and is trying to get out in front of this fast. (Expect astroturf on this very soon.) Read the whole thing, though and you can see that this does appear to be a real trend and a very real cause for alarm for Democrats. There are a lot of reasons for Democrats to worry right now and a lot of signs that they may well have a disaster coming as early as 2010.
The unemployment numbers are horrendous. There is no way they can recover before 2010. Heck, they are so bad that if they were to suddenly turn around, the nation would be plunged into a hyper-inflationary cycle.
Wonder why the White House is in full denial mode right now?
