Another poll came out today showing McCain with the narrowest of national leads, this time from the much-maligned Zogby, that shows McCain ahead by a single point, 42%-41%. It is kind of hard to respect a pollster that puts pop-up ads on his own website, but I digress. That margin is identical to the one from Rasmussen again today. The national margin from Pollster.com is down to only a 2.0% lead for Obama, equaling his lowest margin since Clinton dropped out of the campaign on June 7th.
The changing partisan environment is a double-edged sword in this election that helps explain why Obama isn’t performing better against McCain, even though downticket Democrats across the country seem to be performing extremely well. Simply put, there are more Democrats, but fewer of them are supporting Obama than supported recent Democratic nominees.
As the New York Times notes today, Democrats have made broad gains in partisan registration, relative to Republicans, in virtually every state with partisan registration. This is related to the broad shift toward Democrats in partisan self-identification, which, according to outlets like Rasmussen and Pew, now gives Democrats an edge they haven’t enjoyed in over twenty years. However, a Democracy Corps composite poll released today shows that virtually all of the groups were Obama is under-performing compared to 2004 and 2006 are almost all Democratic self-identifiers:
Obama’s current margin compared to Democrats in 2004 / 2006
White Younger Democrats (11% of the electorate): – 9% / – 14%
White Liberal Democrats (12%): – 7% / – 5%
White Democratic Women (15%): – 6% / – 16%
White Older Democrats (14%): – 4% / – 16%
White Older Democratic Women (8%): – 3% / – 16%
This mirrors the findings of the Gallup poll, where Obama is overperforming Kerry in virtually every demographic, but underperforming among Democrats.
So, there are lots more Democrats, and as such local, downticket Democrats around the country are performing extremely well. However, Obama is underperforming among a wide range of white Democratic groups, thus preventing him from taking advantage of the newfound Democratic edge. In an attempt to avoid simplistic answers, there are at least four reasons why Obama is underperforming among these groups:
- First, anytime your coalition increases in size, it becomes less coherent. Even though Democrats were never a particularly tight and coherent group, the new, larger coalition is even less tight and less coherent.
- Second, McCain has always scored well among Democratic self-identifiers, which was why he was the only Republican who had a chance in this cycle. For example, Quinnipiac previously showed that McCain underperformed among Republicans, but overperformed among Democrats.
- Third, there is clearly a racial element, given that all of the groups where Obama is performing worse come among white voters.
- Fourth, Obama isn’t running as a partisan, and his campaign’s strategy is not geared toward increasing his margins among the base.
So, in many ways, this is to be expected, even if it isn’t comforting. While there are more Democrats, Obama is not performing very well among Democrats, at least relative to 2004 and 2006. Hopefully, this provides an explanation for why Democrats in general are performing so well, but Obama isn’t. Just because we can elect Travis Childers does not necessarily mean that we will dominate every permutation of a national election. |
