Political pro Dick Morris sees something in the latest polling that is causing a heap of problems for Democrats this summer.
Obama’s personal favorability is dropping.
Check the numbers in the lastest NY Times/CBS poll. In the past 3 months, Obama’s favorables have dropped from 42% to 36% and his unfavorables shot up to near 50%.
The poll gives the Romney-Obama race a 47-46% edge to Romney. Obama’s got 36% favorables and 46% of the vote. That’s a huge amount of people voting for Obama who don’t even like him.
Morris says this isn’t just the economy talking, but a backlash on the barrage of negative campaigning Democrats are doing.
“While the Times poll showed that the percent of voters who feel he is doing a good job in handling the economy has dropped to 36%, Obama’s ratings in this category have been low for some time. The drop in favorability is new.
“Rather the cause of his decreased likeability is his negative campaigning, both in person and on the air. He is now no longer the sunny, optimistic, friendly person he portrayed himself as being in 2008. Instead, a nasty, surly, angry image has taken over.”
This is a big change, says Morris. Last summer, Obama’s personal favorably ran 10 points higher than his vote percentage. More people were willing to say they liked Obama than vote for him.
That’s history. Now over a fifth of Obama voters don’t even like him anymore.
Morris argues that this means Obama needs to go positive, and fast, or risk losing masses of voters to Romney or to apathy.
Somehow, I don’t see that coming. Obama has been negative early and often, and I suspect he is only going to ratchet up the hits.
What these numbers tell me is Obama has little choice but to launch a campaign so vicious that those voters who don’t like him are so scared to death of a President Romney, they’ll re-elect him unhappily, holding their noses right through November.
It’s hard to believe the Obama campaign can get more negative than it already is. But I think it will.
