Will Obama’s lackluster approval rating drag the Democratic Party down to defeat in November? I don’t think so. If the Democrats do badly this fall, it won’t be because Obama made it impossible for them to win. It’ll be because too few people voted.
President Obama’s Republican opponents and the media like to make sure everyone knows that Obama’s approval ratings are not great. Of course, they usually fail to point out that Obama’s predicament is not exactly unusual for a president this far into his second term. The other thing they miss is that Obama’s average approval rating of just under 42 percent – as measured by the RealClearPolitics (RCP) poll of polls – makes the president among the more popular officials in Washington right now.
The RCP average approval rating for Congress is just 14 percent. And a Harris poll released Tuesday puts the approval of Congress much lower than that – just 7 percent, down from 8 percent a month earlier. Furthermore, Harris found, “only 18 percent of Americans give a positive rating for the overall job their member of the House of Representatives is doing, down from 22 percent in June.”
It would be nice for progressives to assume that these numbers are a rebuke of Republican leadership of the House and the unrelenting GOP obstructionism in the Senate. But, realistically, it’s probably more accurate to read this as a sign of Americans’ disgust with Washington in general. People clearly are sick of the games, the posturing and the lack of progress they see coming from inside the beltway. They have felt that way for quite a while.
Given the public’s attitude about its federal government, it’s not surprising that Obama’s popularity would suffer along with that of everyone else in Washington. But, the fact that the president remains several times more popular than Congress – and more than twice as popular as the average House member – is actually, in its own sad way, kind of remarkable.
If the Democrats do poorly in the mid-term elections in November, the Obama haters will be quick to blame it on the president’s “deep unpopularity,” the collapse of his 2008 and 2012 coalitions, a surge of conservative sentiment in the country, or some combination of the three. But, because of Obama’s relative popularity (relative being the operative word here), I expect the real Obama effect to be anywhere from negligible to marginally positive.
The real threat we face has nothing to do with Obama. Our enemy is apathy.
With Americans moving to the left on key issues and minority populations growing, this election will come down to the mundane, but vital issue of who actually shows up at the polls.
A low-turnout election amplifies the voices of the minority of hard-right, ideologically driven voters who always, always, always vote. They vote in the rain. They vote in the snow. They will crawl across broken glass if they have to. That’s because their politics is largely controlled by their fears and fear is a great motivator.
The rule of thumb here is this: If everybody votes, we win. If most people stay home, we lose. Certainly, Obama has a role to play here in rallying the troops and getting out the vote. But, for the most part, this election will be won or lost depending what we do.
So, dagnabbit... get out the vote.
