If the Election Were Held Today, Obama Would Lose in a Landslide

The president's national numbers look bad, but his polling in battleground states is even worse, and the debt-limit standoff hasn't helped him

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President Obama's job approval rating in the latest national polls has been in the danger zone, ranging from 42 percent (Gallup) to 47 percent (ABC News/Washington Post), with every survey showing him with higher unfavorables than favorables. Needless to say, it's not a good place for a president to be, especially since his numbers have worsened over the past two months.

The race for president isn't a national contest. It's a state-by-state battle to cobble an electoral vote majority. So while the national polls are useful in gauging the president's popularity, the more instructive numbers are those from the battlegrounds.




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Polls are just a snapshot, and these illustrate that the sour economy has been taking its toll on the president's popularity. There's plenty of time left before November 2012, but the fundamentals--projections of long-term slow economic growth, a White House struggling to tailor a message on job creation, and an energized Republican base--don't bode well. The president's best hope is for a deeply polarizing Republican nominee, such as Bachmann, to emerge.

Obama's performance so far on the debt-ceiling debate hasn't improved his standing, either. Pundits may have graded the president a winner in the battle, but it wasn't long ago that the White House was demanding a clean debt-ceiling increase from congressional Republicans. Now, it appears that whatever deal ends up being struck will be much closer to the GOP's terms, with the president looking less consequential in the whole process.

Obama let his frustration show at last Friday's press conference, looking helpless while talking down the prospects of economic growth without a long-term deal. He may end up being forced to either accept a debt-ceiling package crafted by House Republicans or threaten a veto that could send markets reeling. And somehow, he manages to become more popular after all is said and done?

At this point, even a last-minute agreement that runs until after the presidential election benefits no one politically. It only underscores how broken Washington is, and that's not good news for any incumbent, including the president.

For some time, the conventional wisdom has been that 2012 will be a close presidential contest, with a best-case scenario for Republicans of winning the race with a map similar to George W. Bush's 2004 victory over Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).

But if the president can't turn things around, that logic could prove badly outdated. If Obama is struggling in the Democratic-friendly confines of Michigan and Pennsylvania (as recent polls have indicated), it's hard to see him over-performing again in more-traditional battlegrounds such as Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia.

Unless the environment changes significantly, all the money in the president's reelection coffers won't be able to expand the map; it can only defend territory that's being lost. And just as House Democrats played defense to protect the growing number of vulnerable members in last year's midterms, Obama is looking like he'll be scrambling to hold onto a lot of the states that he thought would be part of an emerging Democratic majority.

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Josh Kraushaar is the political editor for National Journal.

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