Obama Sinking In NC
That’s the takeaway from a new SurveyUSA poll of 524 likely voters that shows Obama trailing Mitt Romney, albeit by the slimmest of margins (45% to 44% with 6% undecided) and well within the margin of error range.
That’s a significant shift from only a month ago, when a WRAL News survey of registered voters had Obama leading by four points, 47 to 43 percent. The real damage, though, comes when you look at the latest poll’s crosstabs. More specifically, the party affiliation of likely voters shows Democrats given a sizeable 15-point higher sampling than Republicans, with a R/D/I breakdown of 29/44/24. That’s like starting a football game with the ref giving your team a two-touchdown spot – and you still lose.
Decidedly not good news for Team BO in a state where Democrats parked their national convention with the hopes of energizing the base to help Obama hold a swing state that he won four years ago by less than 15,000 votes. This from WRAL:
“The president has had his support eroding (in North Carolina),” said David McLennan, a political science professor at William Peace University in Raleigh. “He’s got a big task in front of him.”
There are clear divisions between the two candidates along racial and gender lines in the latest poll. Romney, for example, is preferred by male voters by a 51 to 38 percent margin, while Obama is favored by female voters by 50 to 40 percent, according to the poll.
Obama would carry more than 80 percent of the black vote in North Carolina, the poll shows, but Romney holds a 56 to 35 percent edge among white voters and an even larger lead – 52 to 27 percent – among Hispanic voters.
Eighteen percent of Democrats surveyed said they favor Romney, which is three times the number of Republican who would cross over to vote for Obama, according to the poll.
And recall that earlier this month Obama managed to pull only 79 percent of the state’s primary vote, running against the fierce Democrat ballot competition of somebody named “No Preference.”
November, granted, is still decades away in political time and with what will undoubtedly be the whole of mainstream media running cover for Obama every step of the way and against a candidate like Romney who has shown a propensity for committing major gaffes and straying off-message, anything can happen.
But even those two factors working in tandem might not be enough to salvage a Tar Heel win for Obama.
McLennan said Obama is “pushing on two fronts” by waging a battle for same-sex marriage in a state that two weeks ago approved a constitutional amendment to define heterosexual marriage as the only legal union at the same time as he works to improve the economy.
“The president has to hope the economy keeps coming back, and he’s also got to get the whole campaign off the issue of same-sex marriage,” McLennan said. “He’s got to push his own economic plan and really confront Mitt Romney on that.”
That’s not exactly a winning strategy in a state still crippled by one of the highest jobless rates in the nation and that just overwhelming rejected what has become the country’s first gay president’s signature social issue; but it’s all that Obama has to offer.
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