Polls: Doom Hangs Over Obama Campaign

It won’t surprise you to hear that Obama faces a difficult challenge in getting re-elected. It might surprise you, however, just how difficult that challenge may be. I’ve been saying for some times that Obama is looking at a potential landslide loss. Now Gallup agrees with me.

Gallup is not exactly conservative friendly when it comes to polling. In fact, they can always be counted on to skew things 3-5% to the left. So when they predict doom for a Democrat, it bears noticing. And right now they’re predicting doom for Obama. Consider these findings:

● Obama’s approval rating averaged 44% in 2011. This is down from 47% in 2010, which resulted in historic carnage for his party in the November 2010 elections.

● At the start of 2011, Obama’s approval ratings topped 50% in only 16 states.

● By the third quarter of 2011, this had fallen to 10 states.

● Obama’s approval ratings rose only in Wyoming, Connecticut and Maine.

This spells doom for Obama. For one thing, Obama has horrible poll numbers: 44% just isn’t enough to get re-elected. Moreover, they have been consistently low throughout his administration -- confirming the trend. What’s worse, even as his national numbers have largely stabilized (or at least their descent has slowed), his state by state numbers continue to sink. And it is the state by state numbers that really matter because of our electoral college system. In other words, Obama may win California by 17%, but every vote after 50% +1 is wasted. Hence, all that matters is the number of states he can win, and not the margin of victory in any state.

And when Gallup looked at the state by state numbers, it found that if Obama wins only the states where his popularity exceeds his unpopularity (i.e. his approval > his disapproval), he will lose the 2012 election to GenericRepublican in an electoral landslide of 323 electoral votes to 215 electoral votes. Here’s their map showing how the election would look:

Moreover, it turns out that Obama doesn’t actually have the money advantage that people assumed. Remember talk of the “billion dollar war chest”? It may be a lot smaller than that. Indeed, various people who analyze the pace of fundraising say that Obama is actually running behind Bush’s pace from 2004, and that Obama is likely to end up with only $250 million. . . one quarter of the one billion dollars people expected.

But he still has more money than Romney, right? Not really.

Obama has $81.8 million cash on hand. The DNC has $12.6 million. Outside PACs favoring Obama have only about $4 million. It comes to around $98.3 million.

Romney, by comparison, has only $19.9 million in cash. But his super PAC has another $23.6 million. The RNC has $20 million. Along with other groups, this comes to around $94 million.

Further, Obama’s ability to use the bully pulpit of the White House is fading fast. His SOTU speech drew his worst ratings yet and was down 20% from the year before, which was down 20% from the year before, etc. All told, Obama is drawing about half the number of viewers he drew originally and an amazing 27% of those who tuned in left his SOTU within five minutes of starting. This is just more evidence that the people have stopped listening.

Between low ratings and steady poll numbers, I think the public has simply tuned him out. And if that’s the case, then no amount of money will help him. Good luck, President One-Term.