After the Democratic party performed dismally in the midterm elections journalists were quick to link Barack Obama's poor approval rating with the party's bad showing. CBS News noticed that the midterm campaigns that Obama became directly involved in (meaning he attended the candidate's rallies and/or publicly praised them) ended up losing races more often then winning them. But how much did Obama's public perception really affect the elections? Turnout for young voters is poorer during the midterm elections, and young voters generally lean to the left. Meanwhile older voters (who usually lean Republican), have had much better turnout results than the younger voters (43% of total voters for ages 45-64 compared to 13% of total voters for ages 18-29)source. And while the majority of the midterm campaigns that Obama directly supported did not win their respective races, the campaigns supported by Hillary Clinton, widely thought to be the favorite to become the Democratic party's presidential nominee in 2016, did not have that much better of a success rate. It is possible that voters did not feel good about voting for democrats in general because of their disapproval towards Obama, or that Republican candidates simply seemed more appealing this year.
-CBS exit poll: 33.3% of midterm voters claim to vote against the president, 20% claim to vote for the president, 46.7% say the president was not a factor in their decision
Questions:
1.How large do you think Obama's role was in regards to the GOP's success in the Senate and the House of Representatives?
2.Did Obama hurt Democratic midterm candidates by publicly supporting them?
3.How big of deal is voter turnout? Do you think the results would have been drastically different if 100% of eligible voters had participated?
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3 comments:
In my opinion, Obama's performance was around half of the reason that the Democrats lost. As expected, Republicans were not happy with his performance, and that is why it seems that they had a higher voter turnout this year. However, in the end it comes down to whether each individual candidate can deliver a good campaign themselves.
I believe this election would have similar results, with Republicans winning, but the margin would be much smaller. It was clear that Republicans were a lot more passionate about this mid-term election, and seemed to show up in bigger numbers.
Approval rates of President Obama clearly played a part in the decisions of many voters because our society tends to attribute the all the problems or imperfections of the country to the President. Although Obama's involvement in particular campaigns evidently didn't help the candidates, or at least didn't help them enough to win, I think that most of voters probably had their minds made up about who they would vote for, because of the fact that turnout in midterms is lower than in Presidential elections and therefore those who have strong convictions one way or the other are more likely to vote. It would be unfair to pin the failure of certain Democratic campaigns that Obama became involved in on President Obama. There's another crucial aspect of the election results that doesn't necessarily have to do with the President's approval ratings but must be taken into account: overall, Republicans ran the far better campaign, while in contrast Democrats ran one of their worst. Republicans were ultimately more able to persuade voters to participate, which translated to Republican victories.
I agree with Elias that public perception of Obama is inextricably linked with the current economic etc. climate of the US. Thus I question the numbers that say almost half of all voters did not take the president into account for their decision. I would say that his direct support did not hurt candidates, I just can't imagine with his current approval rating he helped all that much. That being said, it seems impossible that Obama wouldn't play a role in the GOP's success. The retrospective voting that generally occurs in this 6th year is based off of everything that Obama and the Democrats did in office. Thus I find it hard to believe that the President, the single most important person in our government, did not play any roll at all in their decision -- especially given the hot topic in Obamacare that was a huge factor in these elections.
Should voter turnout been 100%, clearly results would have been different. However as we have previously discussed, this would likely not be a good thing. While it is true that young people have low voter turnout, a major factor for this is apathy. Personally, I'd prefer fewer people vote than clueless people marking boxes.
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