I have been looking at a couple of the polling reports from the past week. Every single poll for every Federal race is listed at RealClearPolitics. I was interested to see what support there was for David Brooks’s claim in today’s Times that Obama’s lead among white working-class women in the “battleground” states might explain his higher levels of support in those states compared to nationwide polling. Most polling reports do not break down voters into such small groups so finding evidence for his hypothesis is not really possible. However, I did find some interesting variations in how men and women view President Obama when I looked at some of the state-level polls in the competitive states.
In the most recent PPP poll of likely voters in Ohio, men and women were surprisingly no different in their approval of the President. Ohio men are an insignificant one point more approving at 49% compared to 48% of women. In another competitive Midwestern state, Wisconsin, women being more favorable toward Obama (+10%) than men, but the men only split one point unfavorable at 49-50.
In Florida, we again see the common pattern of greater support for Obama among women than men, but the level of male disapproval is higher in Florida. There the gap between approval and disapproval for the President is +14% for women compared to -7% among men. In Virginia, men are even more disapproving at -10%, while women at +13% are about as positive as in Florida.
It looks more and more like the auto bailout was the most politically astute thing Barack Obama has done in his four years in office! I also think these differences between Midwestern and Southern competitive states shows that lumping together all the “battleground” states, as Brooks suggests, misrepresents a more complex reality.
One thing we can say about the battleground states is that politics is more competitive than in the states where the outcome is already known. The recent NPR poll oversampled voters in the twelve most-competitive states and compared their responses to the totals nationwide. The presidential approval question is +5 in the national figures (51-46), but -1 (48-49) in the competitive states.
However nothing struck me more than this remarkable, yet unreported item in the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll: Americans suddenly express a desire to see one party control all the branches of the Federal Government. (Search for Q15.) The poll shows a consistent preference for divided government back as far as 1986 when NBC and the Journal first began asking the question.
Source: NBC News/Wall Street Journal Polls.
Two years ago, as we headed into the 2010 off-year rout of the Democrats, Americans preferred divided government by more than two-to-one (62%-29%). Now that ratio has shifted entirely in the other direction. Fifty-two percent of their respondents endorsed a unified Federal government in the September, 2012, poll compared to 39% who prefer a divided regime. That figure of 52% support for unified government is the highest ever recorded in the NBC/WSJ poll. In no other poll since 1986 has a majority of registered voters endorsed complete partisan control over the Federal Government.
Perhaps our love affair with gridlock might be coming to a close.
