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Think Progress: Is Obama Losing White Voters?
A recent Pew poll that found a significant drop in Obama’s support among working class, non-college educated whites has been widely interpreted as alarming news for the White House. “Obama is losing the white working class,” wrote The New Republic‘s Nate Cohn, a refrain Harry Enten echoed in The Guardian.
Cohn and Enten could be overhyping the results of this particular Pew poll. While it does show that Obama’s approval rating among white working class voters (or “white workers”) fell from 35 percent last November to 26 percent in late July, a similar Pew survey only a few weeks earlier on June 12th showed 34 percent of the “less than college” white voters still approving of Obama’s performance, a decline of only 1 percent from the 35 percent recorded by Pew last November or 2 percent from the 36 percent level of support Obama actually received in the 2012 elections. Since it seems unlikely that a full 9 percent decline in Obama’s approval rating suddenly occurred in a few weeks between June and July, there is a possibility that Pew’s finding of such a sharp decline in the latest survey is exaggerated.
But if Pew’s even partially right, it’s still a huge problem. As Ruy Teixeira and I have argued, white working class voters still represent a very large demographic voting group, so even a three or four percent decline in their support for a Democratic candidate in the 2016 elections could easily spell the difference between victory and defeat.
Cohn and Enten could be overhyping the results of this particular Pew poll. While it does show that Obama’s approval rating among white working class voters (or “white workers”) fell from 35 percent last November to 26 percent in late July, a similar Pew survey only a few weeks earlier on June 12th showed 34 percent of the “less than college” white voters still approving of Obama’s performance, a decline of only 1 percent from the 35 percent recorded by Pew last November or 2 percent from the 36 percent level of support Obama actually received in the 2012 elections. Since it seems unlikely that a full 9 percent decline in Obama’s approval rating suddenly occurred in a few weeks between June and July, there is a possibility that Pew’s finding of such a sharp decline in the latest survey is exaggerated.
But if Pew’s even partially right, it’s still a huge problem. As Ruy Teixeira and I have argued, white working class voters still represent a very large demographic voting group, so even a three or four percent decline in their support for a Democratic candidate in the 2016 elections could easily spell the difference between victory and defeat.
full: http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/08/17/2469861/obama-white-working-class/
Will history repeat itself as Bloomberg News recently found, "Among the 254 counties where food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican Mitt Romney won 213 of them in last year’s presidential election, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by Bloomberg."
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