WI-PPP: Obama leads them all

[pbrower2a]

No real change for Wisconsin.

Map:

Obama vs. Huckabee

Obama vs. Romney

Obama vs. Gingrich

Obama vs. Palin

[pbrower2a]

Why are you using pre-2010 census EV totals?

I began by clipping and pasting someone else's map and then modifying it. Changing the EV totals would take more effort than necessary.

[pbrower2a]

The landslide of 2008 will not happen again. So everystate Obama didn't win you can firmly expect them to vote for the republican candidate. I cant see Obama winning the election by 5 points again so we can move Indiana, North Carolina, Florida and Ohio back  into the Republican column.

If Gingrich or Palin should be the GOP nominee, then Obama wins bigger. Both Huckabee and Romney so far seem to be holding the McCain constituency together fairly well, which will be enough to prevent a real landslide.   Something like 2008 would look like Obama losing Indiana but picking up Arizona, Georgia, or Missouri.

If the President now has a near-50% approval rating seventeen months before the election and a year before even primary campaigning begins, then he is in very good shape. He will take no chances; he will not place himself 'above' the need to campaign.  He will make campaign appearances on behalf of struggling Democratic Senators and those Senate nominees in open seats who seem to have a chance. Winning the Presidential election while the Democrats lose control of the Senate will seem a loss to him.

Much is yet undetermined in the Senate races. Where he appears he makes an impression upon voters.  If opportunities arise in Maine because Olympia Snowe  is 'successfully' teabagged, then expect President Obama there even if Maine is a sure thing for the President. He will almost certainly appear in Virginia (open seat with a retiring Democrat and a good chance to hold), and states with liberal or moderate Senators in 'purple' states (Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, West Virginia). Indiana becomes a possibility for Presidential appearances should the Hard Right successfully tea-bag venerable Senator Dick Lugar in Indiana as it promises. And, of course, there will be Nevada, a state tailor-made for the President these days due to its ideal demographics. Who knows? Maybe some Southern reactionary falters in the Senate.

President Obama abandoned efforts to win many states early in 2008 because he was concerned only with winning the Presidency and had no cause to waste his efforts to win states that he had little chance of winning. In 2012, he will be trying to shape his second term, and how well it goes depends to no small extent upon the shape of Congress. Sure, Bill Clinton could deal with GOP majorities in Congress -- when there were still some RINOs. Now that the GOP is more monolithic in the absence of the likes of John Jeffords, Lincoln Chaffee, and Arlen Spector, the coattails matter as much as the win.

He will win re-election so long as he avoids personal scandals, the economy has no double-dip recession attributed largely to his policies, and America doesn't experience any military or diplomatic catastrophes. It's nearly impossible to lose with 50% approval, and if the President maintains that before the campaign season begins in earnest, he wins. 
 

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You are right about Wisconsin as a necessity for a Democratic President in a close election. But the Republican Governor is now intensely unpopular, and such will not help the Republicans try to defeat President Obama there. Should there be a recall election for the Governor in 2012  coincident with the Presidential election, then voter turnout will be huge. I can imagine Wisconsin giving the President one of the strongest margins of victory even in a 50-50 nationwide election.     

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That is the point. It is the swing voters that decided the Presidential elections of 2000, 2004, and 2008. The GOP will need someone capable of breaking open the Blue Firewall -- someone capable of an appeal in all regions of America. That is ideally someone with no regional weaknesses; Ronald Reagan was the last such type.

The Democrats don't have as weak a bench now as they did going into the 2010 election; they have plenty of  defeated candidates of 2010 who are defaults in the event that the Tea party types fail to deliver what people expect. But that is the House, largely.

The easiest way in which to win the Presidency as an incumbent is to smear an opponent as an extremist or as an incompetent bumbler. Several prospective GOP candidates fit one or the other pattern. Such worked for LBJ in 1972, Nixon in 1972, or to some extent Reagan in 1984. 

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The Obama agenda that he got enacted with the 111th Congress is no longer new. I expect a legislative stalemate until January 2013 at the least. Who gets the blame? Election 2012 will most likely resemble Election 1948 in style, with the President running against Congress.
   

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That will be a problem for Republicans in other states, some less 'blue' -- like Florida, Indiana,  Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. I see President Obama more astute than Harry Truman (if that is possible) and Republicans more polarizing now than they were in 1948.  All in all, the GOP won a Pyrrhic victory in 2010; they have awakened some of the traditional constituencies of the Democrats (basically Labor, secularists, and feminists even if one allows some overlap). I see at the minimum a bare Obama win in the Electoral College if the President gets something near the same number of votes as the Republican challenger (Gore 2000 + CO + NH +  NV or Kerry + CO + IA + NM + NV -- same thing) and 272 electoral votes, with people sweating out New Hampshire all night.  A 5-point electoral win isn't that far off, as four states with fairly-large totals of electoral votes (FL, NC, OH, VA) swing toward President Obama with 75 electoral votes. At a 7-point spread, you start seeing another tier of states (AZ, GA, IN, MO, MT, maybe the Dakotas) going to Obama. Beyond that? Strange things are happening that I can't now predict.

[pbrower2a]

Walker isn't 'intensely'  unpopular; his approval is well into the 40s. He's more popular than his predecessor.

This current issue will be ancient history in 2012 anyway.

43% approval, 57% disapproval, according to Rasmussen. Rasmussen tends to be sympathetic to Republicans. He has approval of President Obama at 55%, which is about what he won with in 2008, if you want to see a contrast. President Obama has been keeping his proboscis out of Wisconsin. Maybe he thinks that Governor Walker will implode on his own.

That's not "well into the forties". He would need a miracle to get re-elected. People seem not to like bait-and-switch politics. I have known of Governors and Senators who recovered from such low levels of approval, but he would need a miracle to get re-elected.

This is from about a week ago by PPP:

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Different pollsters, different methodology, and a difference of one week in a volatile situation. PPP is sympathetic to Democrats, but has an R lean in results.

[pbrower2a]

Walker isn't 'intensely'  unpopular; his approval is well into the 40s. He's more popular than his predecessor.

This current issue will be ancient history in 2012 anyway.

43% approval, 57% disapproval, according to Rasmussen. Rasmussen tends to be sympathetic to Republicans. He has approval of President Obama at 55%, which is about what he won with in 2008, if you want to see a contrast. President Obama has been keeping his proboscis out of Wisconsin. Maybe he thinks that Governor Walker will implode on his own.

That's not "well into the forties". He would need a miracle to get re-elected. People seem not to like bait-and-switch politics. I have known of Governors and Senators who recovered from such low levels of approval, but he would need a miracle to get re-elected.

This is from about a week ago by PPP:

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Different pollsters, different methodology, and a difference of one week in a volatile situation. PPP is sympathetic to Democrats, but has an R lean in results.

That miracle is known as economic growth. It is patently absurd to draw long term conclusions from polls in a 'volatile' situation.

Jennifer Granholm, for instance, was re-elected with approval ratings in the same area.

You saw and recall the same Nate Silver article that I did. Congratulations!

I remember her case as one of the outliers on the low end.
Jennifer Granholm, at the least, didn't govern like a dictator.  In her case, economic improvement saved her Governorship. Scott Walker's unpopularity has nothing to do with economic performance.

44% approval at the start of campaign season is the borderline for a 50-50 chance for an incumbent winning re-election as a Senator and Governor. I use this for predicting how an incumbent President will do in an individual state. With an approval even at 47% going into the campaign an incumbent wins well over 50% of his elections.  The curve looks something like this:

                                                                 
  (near-100% chance of winning)
                                                                         ----------------------------------------
                                                                        /
                                                                       /
                                                                     /
                                                                    |
                                                                    |
                                                                    /
                                                                  /
________________________________/     (near-zero chance of winning)

                                                    39%       44%     49%

(If you can find a graph of a titration curve, that's about what the prediction looks like).

It's also possible to have what looks like a strong position going into the race, like George Allen in 2006 who was actually above 50% early but then faced an unusually-strong challenger and melted down late.  Strange things can happen, like the breaking of a scandal -- but somehow that often shows up in the secretiveness of a politician very early. People who give others the creeps often have cause for giving people the creeps.

Granholm was one of the low-end outliers.  Others in or near the low end were Conrad Burns, Rick Santorum, Lincoln Chaffee, and  John Corzine. They had trouble early, campaigned well enough to pick up about 5% of the vote share, but that wasn't enough to rescue their faltering careers.  I'm going to figure that Governor Strickland in Ohio and Senator Feingold were in trouble, and Blanche Lincoln had no chance.

Almost all incumbents have shown that they can run a campaign well enough to win at least once and are able to replicate much of what they did in the next one. A very effective campaigner might gain 8% from where he starts, and a more average one might gain about 5%. While in office, incumbent politicians are not in campaign mode until campaign season, and they usually lose a little something from having been elected. During the campaign season they typically make the connections that they did with such as union officers, clergy, news media,  financial angels, and of course campaign staff. Such is often good for a 5% to 7% gain in vote share. But if one's approval is around 40% going into the campaign, then no connections and no get-out-the-vote-drive can rescue one's campaign.  One then needs miracles.

...with Scott Walker, the pollster Rasmussen just showed him with a 43-57 split between approval and disapproval.  There will be ups and downs for any politician; just look at the approval ratings for President Obama. But those are ups and downs often related to the economic realities and the debate on sundry pieces of legislation.   This is very poor after two months in office. I just can't see him doing anything to rescue his popularity. He has taken a daring gamble and has expected the public to appreciate it as brilliance. If all goes right he will convince Wisconsin voters that his way is a sure way to create prosperity for the good of all. Maybe he will make a paradise for incoming businesses and solve his problems by the time that re-election comes along and create a model for other republicans who trounce remaining liberal Democrats in 'blue' states and defeat the re-election bid of President Obama.  But so far the demonstrations against his policy and his reckless slips of the lip suggest more a Captain Queeg than the sort of politician who gets re-elected.

If his approval rating is at 43% going into his re-election bid or into a recall, then he has a slight chance of being re-elected. I can't predict where it will be at such a point; it is just too early. Silver's model is one of predicting the behavior of voters, and not of politicians. Silver could never predict that the disgraced former Governor Blagojevich of Illinois would be recorded in an obscenity-laced telephone conversation in which he tried to sell a Senate seat vacated by President Obama. either. 

[pbrower2a]

Very intersting that wisconsin is closer than Virginia

Rasmussen just showed a 55% approval rating for President Obama, who so far has avoided meddling in Wisconsin politics.   Rasmussen tends to have fewer undecided than PPP.

[pbrower2a]

Don't count on it...this union gutting is spreading all over the country and we will be fighting this well into the summer/fall. If not in Wisconsin, in other states.

Walker's number are falling fast...I wouldn't be surprised if his numbers were 'disastrous' by the end of the year...

That's called raising the stakes, if it happens, it happens. I think both the pro-union Democrats and the anti-union Republicans are confident in their position, so lets have that debate.

It's "Get away with what you can while you can", power politics at their crudest.

[pbrower2a]

May results:

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Still with a sample more R than the vote of 2008.

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_WI_0525930.pdf

[pbrower2a]

Obama vs. Romney

Obama vs. Gingrich

Obama vs. Palin

[pbrower2a]

May results:
Still with a sample more R than the vote of 2008.

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_WI_0525930.pdf

42% McCain, and 37D/32R/31I are both quite reasonable. This one looks accurate.

The point: even with an electorate more R in 2012 than in 2008, President Obama wins Wisconsin decisively. Wisconsin is already a disaster for Republicans.

[pbrower2a]

May results:
Still with a sample more R than the vote of 2008.

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_WI_0525930.pdf

42% McCain, and 37D/32R/31I are both quite reasonable. This one looks accurate.

The point: even with an electorate more R in 2012 than in 2008, President Obama wins Wisconsin decisively. Wisconsin is already a disaster for Republicans.

It's not a tier 1 pickup, but it doesn't have to be.

NC and VA look pretty bad for the Republicans too though. As for Colorado and Nevada.....

Honestly, Ohio seems to be the only bright spot for Republicans, if that.

Pennsylvania is looking pretty good for the pubs all things considered.

Obsolete poll. Pennsylvania has a comparatively old population, and the proposal  to eviscerate Medicare can't do well there.  It's hard to believe that the state is more R than Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, or Virginia.