The unhappy news just continues to roll in for the Obama administration. Via Allah at Hot Air, a new CNN poll seems to confirm what voters in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts having been telling the rest of the country for several months.
The results of the poll look like a Dear John letter to incumbents, but the pull quote is that 52% think President Obama doesn’t deserve a second term. The Hill sums it up succinctly:
52 percent of Americans said President Barack Obama doesn’t deserve reelection in 2012, according to a new poll.
44 percent of all Americans said they would vote to reelect the president in two and a half years, less than the slight majority who said they would prefer to elect someone else.
Obama faces a 44-52 deficit among both all Americans and registered voters, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll released Tuesday. Four percent had no opinion.
Such early polls are easy to dismiss but in light of the Bayh, Murkowski and Kennedy retirements it’s more than obvious that politicians with actual skin in the game are reading these same polls and making career decisions based on them and real election results. I’ll surmise that there is a groundswell of anger in the electorate that the Tea Party movement has just barely tapped into. Those incumbents that are threatened are not just liberal and blue dog Democrats but also moderate and liberal Republicans. There is a deep reservoir of anger directed at this “professional class” of politicians who are variously referred to as elitists, career bureaucrats and “special interest sell outs” that always thrive during economic booms but invariably encounter trouble in a difficult economic environment.
When voters have to make hard decisions at home about their own personal budgets it is inevitable that they will focus that same attention on their pols. Ironically, the professional legislative and bureaucratic class is always slow to catch on to this. That’s why the 2010 elections could be a wipe out of historic proportions.
