Actually, it is more telling to start with all the people who WILL NOT vote for Obama this time then work our way down.
Some general considerations, by the numbers:
In 2008, a total of 129 million people voted for the two major party candidates, 53% Obama, 46% McCain. That represented an increase of 10 million from the 2004 election. Of registered voters, 71% voted, a modern-era high. That is the wave Obama is riding… or thinks he is.
In 2010, a total of 91,000,000 people voted in the midterms, with roughly the same split in favor of the GOP, also a modern-era high in turnout. This is the wave conservatives are genuinely riding.
Obviously, something has to give, or, more likely, already has given.
Just for the sake of argument let’s assume that Romney will get at least as many votes as John McCain, or 60 million. That’s the “Even Reince Priebus Could Get 60 million Votes” floor this election. In fact, it will likely go up as McCain caused at least 5% of the conservative base to stay home and this time they are roaring back. So let’s say the GOP has a rock solid 48% right now, not counting any enthusiasm factor whatsoever. (Obama had almost 100% of the enthusiasm in 2008, and with an opposite spin, seems to have it all in 2012 as well, but that’s another story.)
But by comparison Obama enjoys almost no rock-solid numbers this year. Of the 69m who voted for him in 2008, I can’t begin to establish where his sure-fire floor may be. Not even in California.
This is territory pollsters don’t like to go, in part because it involves a lot of intangibles, and quite frankly, they can’t count intangibles.
But the intangibles tell quite a different tale, and quite frankly, puts a lot more states in play than any pollster is counting, for all the intangibles stack up against Obama.
You will find Obama losing significant voters across the board in groups that swung heavily in his favor in 2008. I know this is happening, you know this is happening, so when polls tell us that Obama gets across-the-board failing grades in leadership, foreign policy, economic policy, yet remains popular, or has 270 electoral votes nearly locked up, we know there is a disconnect between the polling and voter reality. Pollsters don’t know how to measure “enthusiasm” or “outrage” or “momentum.” Or even where to look. What they don’t know about voter attitudes this year, as in 2010, is incalculable.
How it will likely show up in hindsight will be called “suppressed voter turn out,” only here’s the rub, it is Obama who is suppressing his own turnout.
Both camps’ media advertising is directed to some extent to suppressing the other guy’s turn-out, i.e., “Don’t vote for that guy” ads. He’s too sneaky, dishonest, oily, felonious.
The advantage Romney has is that Obama, just by getting out of the bed in the morning and doing what he has always done for 3 1/2 years, and not doing what’s he was supposed to be doing for 3 1/2 years, is suppressing a far greater number of his 2008 voters than Mitt Romney ever could with slick ads.
So, Who Won’t Vote for Obama a second time around?
The Buyer’s Remorse Vote
The common theory among conservatives is that a no-show is a vote for Obama. But in fact, a no-show from an Obama voter in 2008 will be a vote for Romney, and this will occur in the millions this year.
Using the old Yogi Berra aphorism, if people don’t want to vote for Obama, there’s nothing he can do to stop them.
Pollsters get this about 75% right, for the largest bloc of Buyer’s Remorse Voters will be the vaunted Independents (not to be confused with “moderates”) who voted for Obama in ’08 and have already solidly changed their minds. And nothing can change it back, not even Mitt’s friendly acquaintance with a ewe named Maggie one summer at 4-H camp (as Harry Reid will allege within a few weeks.) Obama spends a lot of time trying to dissuade this group from voting for Romney, but only on the theory that Mitt will be just as lousy as he is. That’s the best pitch he has. But independents are the best-versed voters around in the realities of the political economy and they won’t buy it.
But there is much more to the Buyer’s Remorse crowd and this is where pollsters and media alike don’t get it. To understand this you have to recall what was known back in the ’80s as the “Wilder Effect,” named for Doug Wilder, former black governor of Virginia. If asked, no one, NO ONE, ever said he wouldn’t vote for Doug Wilder (a man I know and personally like). Even anonymously, most people will try to avoid any inference of racism by speaking harshly of any prominent black man.
Actually opinion suppression, the Wilder effect is in full play today, among all groups, but especially among public sector employees; federal, state, county, city and school. As we already have seen with the Wisconsin recall election, almost no school teacher or union member dared express publicly any preference for Scott Walker (even though he had saved their jobs in many cases), but they sure did show up election day.
Pollsters would be wise to trim as much as 10% off the top of every public sector voting model they have, and attribute it to Buyers-Remorse, and rack it up to the Wilder Effect.
The “You Didn’t Build That” Vote
This may well be the largest untapped bloc of anti-Obama resentment in America, which stretches across every voting group who largely supported him in 2008.
Arguably the most self-damning comment Obama has ever made as president, a direct slap in the face of what really is, the heart and soul of the American Dream, to be able to build a thing from scratch and be your own boss, Obama mistakenly believed he could get a pass just as he did with his “spread the wealth” comment to Joe the Plumber in 2008.
Obama never did well with the private sector small business voter anyway, so probably feels there is no great loss here. But the manner in which Obama telegraphed his “You didn’t build that” was a deep slap at a large portion of his base, for it exposed a deep-seated belief in Obama that this is not so much as how things are as how things thing are going to be. How things have to be. And even the poorest of Americans find that repugnant.
Obama has misunderestimated the American people, including a large portion of his own base.
The whole ideal of America is predicated on the idea that a man can strike out on his own to try anything he wants to try. Virtually everyone in America wants to be his own boss, and if he can’t be, he holds out hope that his children can. And mothers are stronger in this conviction than dads.
America was built by a nation of free holders who owned a piece of land. They ran their farms like businesses, if only to churn out a few dollars a month profit. It would be the post-Civil War industrial era, seeded by millions of immigrants from Asia and Europe, that a landless working class would outnumber this privately owned business sector. This is where Obama’s teachers stopped reading history, for then, against all the laws of Marx and Engels, within two generations the vast majority of those immigrants also owned a piece of land, a store, or an empire. And “They Built It,” not Wilson, not FDR, not LBJ.
Working for another man’s pay is a relatively recent phenomenon in America, arising mostly out of the Great Depression, when a man clung to a job as he would his mother’s breast. That a man can indeed “Build it” is ingrained in even the poorest of America’s psyche.
Which calls to bear the great unwritten law inside Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment. Every communist contract with the poor and landless of a country starts out with this: We will give you schools, but you can only read what we allow you to read. OK, they say. We will provide you decent housing, but you can only live where we say you can live. OK. We will provide you jobs, but you can only work at what we want you to work at. OK.
But the communists always have a fine print in their contracts which reads “This contract shall also apply to your children and your children’s children.” I can’t say why, but the poor of Nicaragua found this fine print and quickly threw the communists out.
Obama let this communist fine print cat out of the bag out in Roanoke, Virginia. While pleading to the have-nots to get even with the haves, he let it be known that he intended to get rid of all haves except for the approved state class. He wasn’t saying “You didn’t build that” but “You won’t ever get to build that,” and for a group far larger than his tiny mind can ever know that is language that is contrary to everything they hope for their children and their children’s children to achieve.
The Women’s Vote
In 2008 Obama won the unmarried female vote 70-29, while McCain won the married women’s vote 57-42, giving Obama a net 56-43 margin. Many say, this group actually carried the election for Obama.
Besides diminishing numbers among mothers, even single parents, and state workers, since 2009, 766,000 of those women who voted for Obama have lost their jobs. Moreover, half of the 7.5 million new jobs/voters coming on line since he took office are women, and most of these can’t find meaningful work, with or without a college degree. And then there are those student loans. Voter registration among this age group has shifted to the GOP. So, Obama’s numbers here are due to fall across the board among women.
The Blacks who Won’t Vote for Obama
Here’s where the math gets sticky, for African-Americans will still vote for Obama in the same 95-5 ratio they do in most elections But as many as 20% will not show up this year. More, if they could get away with it. Since most never knew that Martin Luther King was a Republican, or that it was the GOP, against strong Democrat opposition, that pushed the Civil Rights Acts through, blacks still won’t vote for a Republican, no way, no how.
Inner city blacks are truly captive and almost have to vote, even if they don’t want to, for someone will surely show up to drive them to the polls. And someone else will look over their shoulder, or even punch the card for then, while the Black Panthers stand guard outside to make sure no cameras can chronicle these atrocities. But rural and small town blacks, who go to church more often than city folks anyway, are getting an earful these days about Obama and gay marriage, a thing they find more noxious than poorly prepared poke.
And far more than women, blacks have been hit disproportionately hard by rising unemployment, and it is beginning to sink in that after 40 years of promises by Democrats, things really haven’t gotten any better. Moreover, blacks at every economic level have an uneasy relationship with the new gays rights movement. For one, blacks raise precious few gay males or females (raising suspicions that maybe gayness is indeed environmental, not genetic), and two, have just about had it up to here with gay inferences that their getting beat up at bars while cruising for good looking sleep-overs is somehow remotely akin to their getting burned out, strung up or having dogs sicced on them for trying to vote.
Expect 15%-20% lower turnout by blacks this time around, and expect about a 1%-2% uptick to the GOP, to boot.
The Catholic Vote
Like Jews, there is a large “non-practicing” Catholic community in America who have always been pro-contraception. But that does not translate to pro-abortion, as many believe, nor to pro-state mandated contraception. The Mother Church is still the Holy Mother Church, and the Obama Administration attacks on the Church are broadly seen as just that, an attack on the Church and the freedom of religion. In much the same way it is believed that the state leaped the wall of separation to steal the word “marriage” from the world’s religions, it is also seen that the state has now tried to steal from the world’s religions (Catholic, Jew, Baptists, etc) who built the first and arguably the best heath care facilities in America, their right to run those facilities according to their faith.
They all should be saying to Obama, “You didn’t build that. We did.”
The Labor Vote
I already mentioned the “Buyer’s Remorse” vote among government employees at every level. I affectionately refer to these as skirt unions, SEIU especially. A couple of years back I asked the question if the rank and file of the “guy unions” (AFL-CIO) knew that their leadership had almost all gone communist? Trumka, Hoffa, the lot of them. A crook or a thug, they can understand, as long as the work rules were square, and pay above average. But a communist, I doubt it.
Because of other issues, such as the war on the Church, and the triage certain unions are employing to dispossess some retirees from benefits, and a general love of America and that promise that some day their kids can build something on their own, I think we may see another large swing to the GOP by the rank and file this time around, as they did with Reagan in 1980. Watch Joe the Plumber in Ohio-9. A working stiff, the local Dems and Marcy Kaptur have beaten him up for being a working stiff, while claiming they represent the working man. The rank and file are beginning to see that their union bosses will have no pull in Washington for the next several years, and they will be wise to take matters in their own hands and elect people who will work with them rather than for the union headquarters around the country.
The Jewish Vote
As goes Israel so goes all but the most communist of (non-practicing) Jewish voters in America. Plus a few retirees in south Florida who really don’t care that their grandchildren will have to pay for their cozy excesses today. Expect Obama’s Jewish vote to drop 20%.
The Youth Vote
Obama just doesn’t have this sector as wrapped up as he thinks he does. True, as students they had full run of the vigor and stupidity of youth, but after graduation, with bills piling up, mom’s cooking again, and dad’s bitching again, “Well 7-11 is better than nothing, after all you chose to get a degree in Sociology, how about helping out around here a little?”…no way they’re going to blame George W Bush. But in keeping with their public school educations, they will have to blame someone. Expect a lot of them to blame Obama, which will be many’s first step toward recovery.
And of the new youth, those who have been eligible to vote only since Obama was inaugurated, the majority are registering Republican. This is not the win he expected.
So, Who will Vote for Obama?
The Dependency Vote is holding firm, mostly because they will be forced out of bed, force driven, and force-walked into the voting booth. If not, 20% will stay home.
The Slut Vote– The always reliable promiscuity–free contraceptive vote, law school vote, New York Upper East Side vote, and scattered divorced women around the country who have seen their net worth diminished and the courts unwilling to jack up their ex’s alimony payments. But even the slut vote took a slap in the choppers, thanks to Sandra Fluke. Now they have a name. Across the rigid pro-Obama women’s spectrum, there are fissures of stress and anxiety. Even diminished self-confidence.
The Sangerite Vote, Environmental Wacko Vote and Gay Vote – As weird, unnatural, contradictory coalitions are always doomed to do, these may split over Obama, especially if a Green Party gets any traction. And about gays, Obama’s mistake was in believing that this group’s voting power matched their money. When he dumped five million black Christian’s votes for less than a dollar a vote from the Gay-Hollywood coalition, my first thought was that Obama is going to take it on the lamb and head to Brazil, in exile. Too bad Chick-fil-A is not on the GOP ticket.
The Big Business-Wall Street Vote– They think themselves pragmatists, but represent the almost complete burial of what used to be known as “business ethics” from the corporate community. And to think, we always thought Gordon Gekko was a Republican. Yeah, and Oliver Stone is a Franciscan.
The Apparatchik Vote, as mentioned above, diminishing somewhat, but upper management in government is firmly locked into the current power scheme. Also the first to be fired if Romney wins. If only these fascists could keep the trains running, they’d have some hope of holding onto their jobs.
The Wannabe Apparatchik Vote (about 25% of the Occupy movement), they’ll vote for anyone who will give our poster boy, above, a job telling us how better to live our lives.
Bottom Line:
So, if there were only gays and lesbians, horny single white women, pissed-off black women, secure GSA employees and other associated criminals in Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Florida, and Pennsylvania voting, I’d say Obama’s got a lock on this race.
But by my accounting, except for California, Hawaii, Washington and Oregon (thanks to Elizabeth “Squaw” Warren, even MA’s not a lock) the rest of the country is nothing but swing states.
Obama has suppressed at least 20%-30% of his expected vote and he cannot seduce even a fraction of new replacements.
#I’m just saying.
