Obama Ascendant: Is It Enough?

The results of the elections in November will in no small part be determined by President Obama's popularity by the end of the year. Republicans, who have been relentlessly hammering the president over the Affordable Care Act for the last four years, know it, and they've squeezed quite a bit of mileage out of it. Democrats know it too--especially Democrats running in red states that Gov. Romney won in 2012. The latest ad from Sen. Mary Landrieu shows the Louisiana Democrat calling the Obama administration policies toward oil and natural gas "simply wrong":

While playing up her new role as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee (a significant role for a senator from a state where trade, transportation, and utilities is the single largest employment sector), the ad continues Sen. Landrieu's trend of distancing herself from the president, who, last The Huffington Post checked, had about a net 20% disapproval rating in the state. For Sen. Landrieu's campaigning purposes, it's probably the smart thing to do: the president's approval rating has historically had a substantial effect on the results of midterm elections.

It's reasonable to assume, then, that if President Obama can get his approval ratings up by November, his party will stand to do much better in the elections--optimistically, they could suffer a loss of three or four Senate seats as opposed to, I don't know, nine or ten. (We consider South Dakota, Montana, and West Virginia likely to flip, Arkansas leaning toward Republicans, Alaska, Louisiana, and North Carolina toss-ups, and Democrats on shaky ground in Iowa and Michigan.) We'll see if Democrats have reason to be optimistic in the coming months: according to the RealClearPolitics approval tracker, the president still has a net disapproval rating, but one that's been coming down for the last three weeks or so. It's the steadiest decline his disapproval has seen since December.

The problem with that metric is that that particular polling average is nation-wide. President Obama's net disapproval is going down--in the states that don't matter. His approval ratings in the competitive Senate elections paint a much more worrying picture. In Louisiana, as you saw in the HuffPollster graph, his net disapproval is basically holding steady, as is the case in Arkansas. Even worse for President Obama are the trends in Iowa, Michigan, and North Carolina, all of which show the gap between his disapproval and approval numbers widening.

And it's not clear how much of these trends can be halted or reversed. The usual culprits for low presidential approval ratings are corruption, unpopular wars, sluggish growth, and high unemployment. Due to the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment we won't open the question of whether the Obama administration is corrupt, but there hasn't been a real scandal for a while--unless you count HealthCare.govgate, Benghazigate, IRSgate, or NSAPRISMSnowdengate. Which you really shouldn't. (-Gate is just a great suffix you can attach to anything.) There's no particularly unpopular war going on right now--at least, not on the scale of what Iraq was to the Bush administration in its sixth year.  Afghanistan right now appears to be a background event to domestic happenings. Growth is sluggish, true--out of the competitive states, only North Carolina's gross state product is growing faster than national GDP. Unemployment, meanwhile, has been decreasing slowly in those vulnerable Democratic states: of them, only in Michigan and Louisiana has unemployment fallen back to pre-recession levels. Meanwhile, in the two most likely Democratic pickups, Georgia and Kentucky, unemployment is still running about two points above summer 2008 levels.

However, a lot of President Obama's disapproval ratings in red states is due to the Affordable Care Act--something that is unlikely to be mitigated by an improving economy, except maybe if unemployment drops to 0% and GSP begins growing at 7% or so. And even then, it's not certain: North Dakota has amazingly low unemployment (2.4%) and throttling growth (13%), and somehow we doubt that the president's approval rating there is particularly high. (We could be wrong, of course; unfortunately polls don't pay very good attention to North Dakota.) The healthcare law seems to provoke a philosophical dispute rather than an economic one, and no matter how successful it turns out to be, we believe that it's going to be a liability come November. The only real question is how heavy that albatross is going weigh down vulnerable Democrats.