As voters go to the polls today, the bottom line for President Barack Obama and the Democrats is this: they face an angry electorate, in some ways record setting in its disappointment and anger. The New York Daily News:
With the GOP expected to take over the House and make gains in the Senate, a new CNN survey found that 56 percent of likely voters believe the president hasn’t paid attention to the most important problems, while just 42 percent of likely voters said Obama has the right priorities.
With the GOP expected to take over the House and make gains in the Senate, a new CNN survey found that 56 percent of likely voters believe the president hasn’t paid attention to the most important problems, while just 42 percent of likely voters said Obama has the right priorities.
A stunning 75 percent of likely voters said things in the country were going pretty badly or very badly — the worst rating since the poll started asking the question in the 1970s.Polls show widespread frustration over Obama — who remained off the campaign trial, holed up in the White House yesterday — failing to turn the economy around, while increasing government spending and deficits.
Not a good number — and one that suggests that in some areas Obama’s campaigning either had no impact or hurt Democrats. Another poll:
By a margin of 62 percent to 33 per cent, likely voters believe the country is on the wrong track and 47 percent cited the economy as the biggest problem facing the United States today, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll yesterday.
“It just reconfirms the present environment in which we are in, a bad economy that has been prolonged,” said Ipsos pollster Cliff Young.
“People are basically not optimistic about the near future and they are going to take it out on the party in power, specifically the president and his administration.”
The poll said 50 percent of those polls believed the Obama administration has made the economy worse than it was before, while 26 percent said Obama has made it better.
This means that Democratic efforts to make the election about individual candidates rather than as a kind of referendum on Obama and the efficacy of his administration in improving the economy are unlikely to transform into votes at the polls.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.