With President Obama’s approval ratings falling with almost every poll, some Democrats up for re-election are running in the opposite direction and trying to distance themselves from the unpopular president.
A “Meet the Press” panel discussed this trend on Sunday morning and came to the conclusion that is “never works.”
“It’s a strategy that is always tempting and never works. As we just saw, it’s not just in red states that voted for Romney. In Colorado, Obama won that twice and Mark Udall is trying to distance himself,” said Ramesh Ponnuru, the senior editor of the National Review.
Amy Walter, the national editor of the Cook Political Report, agreed and said this trend is part of the reason Congress is so frequently gridlocked. Voters end up voting out “the compromisers” in favor of more extreme party line voters.
“When those people lose, there is nobody for Republicans to go and to compromise with. That is it and the moderates are gone. It happened in 2006 when Democrats attached everybody to Bush and said they were terrible,” Walter said. “That’s how we get the Congress we get. If you want to push those people out, it’s fine, but they are actually the people who are compromising.”
Watch the full segment below:
