The Republican primaries were essentially over months ago by now. Romney should be basking in his winner's glow and consolidating his base. But that's not exactly what's happening. Of respondents to the DailyKos/SEIU/PPP polls who say they will vote for Romney, only about 80% say they have a favorable opinion of him. That's after a slight nominal increase over the past few months. By contrast, about 94% of Obama voters say they have a favorable opinion of Obama. Both these numbers' trends over time are shown below at the top of the graph, red for Romney and blue for Obama, along with those who have unfavorable opinions and those who are not sure at the bottom.
It's interesting to note that in mid-June, coincident with Obama's immigration policy announcement, favorability among Obama voters dipped slightly, while un-favorability increased. This was only a temporary dip, so either people people's opinions returned to baseline, or those who had a newly unfavorable opinion of Obama left the category of Obama voters altogether.
Common sense would argue that Romney voters who don't like Romney might not be all that motivated to vote. And common sense, in this case, is right: the plurality of these voters are Not At All Excited about voting in the upcoming election. Details below.
The inverse of the graph above is, well, inverted. In the latest poll, 96% of Romney voters do not have a favorable opinion of Obama, while 87% of Obama voters do not have a favorable opinion of Romney. Presumably dislike of Obama is what is motivating that 20% of Republicans who don't like Romney.
But history shows us that this did not work out so well for Kerry, at least.
2004 exit polls showed 39% of Kerry voters were casting their vote mainly against Bush, not for Kerry. Conventional wisdom has it that voting against Bush was not sufficient motivation to bring all of Kerry's potential voters to the polls. What about this year? After all, while the left despised Bush for his policies, the right's hatred of Obama seems to be a little different.
Fortunately, we have data to kill off our idle speculation. Every other week, the Daily Kos poll asks a question about how excited the respondent is to vote in this year's election. If we aggregate these polls, we find that over the last three months, there have been 475 respondents who have said they will vote for Romney even though they do not have a favorable opinion of him (either unfavorable or unsure). Of those 475, about 40% say they are not at all excited about voting in the 2012 elections, implying they would be less likely to vote at all. This compares to only about 10% of Romney voters who view Romney favorably saying they are not at all excited. So yes, indeed, Romney's favorability gap is an electoral liability, and one to keep an eye on.
On the flip side, we might be worried about voters who say they will vote for Obama, but don't have an unfavorable view of Romney, and thus may not be that motivated to vote. But this turns out not to be the case. There's not much difference in excitement between this set of respondents, and voters who say they will vote for Obama and don't like Romney. That's the good news. The bad news, of course, is that Obama voters who say they have a favorable opinion of Romney, may, perhaps, be convinced in the end to vote for the guy, or at least the potential is there.
Finally, what about the voters who aren't sure who they are going to vote for? Do they hate both candidates? There's not many of them each week, but over the past twelve weeks the numbers add up to a substantial amount. Here's what they think of the candidates:
The numbers show the percent of undecideds who hold the views in each row and column. For example, 28% don't like either candidate (lower right), 22% aren't sure about either candidate (middle), and just 4% like both (upper left). Overall, Obama's viewed a little more positively than Romney among these undecided voters.
Right now, Romney still has work to do in winning over not just undecideds but a good share of the people who say they'll vote for him. This nose-pinching Romney voter demographic bears watching over the next few months. Will the convention win them over? If not, will they vote, despite their lack of excitement?