Having given himself a bit of political breathing room on Afghanistan and health care, President Obama is shifting focus to the economy, where he needs to show improvement in time for the 2010 elections.
But also worrisome to Democrats are some fissures emerging in Obama’s winning, 2008 political coalition — specifically eroding support among young voters and independents — in part because of the president’s economic agenda.
Those trends, combined with the results of the 2009 off-year elections that saw Republican gains in key states, suggest Obama’s ability to recreate the sense of mission from his 2008 race in the midterms could be limited.
“Democrats don’t seem energized the way they were in 2008,” said Terry Madonna, a political scientist and pollster at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. “And it’s not so much that Republican turnout is up, it’s that Democratic turnout is down.”
Obama in January had a 74 percent approval rating among voters aged 18 to 29. Last month, his rating among the same group was 61 percent — still strong, but on a persistent, downward trajectory.
More ominous are independents, who gave Obama a 62 percent approval rating in January and dropped their support to 44 percent by November. Exit polling from gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia last month showed independents surging toward Republican candidates — who won in both states.
“Democrats have put themselves at a huge disadvantage with independents because of the unprecedented spending and this unified control of government,” said John Avlon, an expert on independent voters and author of the forthcoming book, “Attack of the Wingnuts.”
Madonna said he saw similar political shifts in Pennsylvania, where Republicans won six of seven statewide contests in November, less than a year after Obama carried the state in the presidential race.
“Independents shifted to the Republican side, the same as you saw in Virginia and New Jersey, and the Obama coalition of young voters, new voters and suburban independents didn’t work for the Democrats at all,” Madonna said.
In addition to a fracturing political coalition, Obama’s biggest first-year initiatives won’t show results for the party until after the 2010 election.
His plan to begin pulling troops out of Afghanistan doesn’t start until 2011, and if health-care legislation passes, it is expected to take at least two years for consumers to start seeing any positive benefits.
Obama’s plans to impose a cap and trade emissions program on industry has been pushed off to his second year, when it’s harder for any incumbent president to get a major agenda item through.
Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University, said Obama’s agenda is better timed to try to help the president in 2012, rather than the Democratic Party in 2010.
“Another problem for Obama is that the economic recovery was a two-year program,” Jillson said. “He has got to wait it out and hope that by spring and summer we are not headed to 11 percent unemployment.”
The president on Tuesday is scheduled to deliver an address on the economy at the Brookings Institution.
