Yesterday, Friday August 19, 2011, was a very bad news day for Barack Obama as headline after headline screamed out failure, Democrats losing confidence in his job performance and future, unemployment rising in 28 states for July, he lost 36 percentage points in the Hispanic demographic since he took office, mortgage rates hit a 50 year low, stocks plunged, etc..... all headlines for one day.
Today is not much better as we see that polling in the very blue state of Pennsylvania, a state almost everyone agrees Obama will need badly to win reelection in 2012, is being called "dismal" for Obama.
President Barack Obama, who political experts say will need a win in Pennsylvania to retain the White House, dipped to 35 percent approval among the state's registered voters, according to a Muhlenberg College poll released Friday.
The results come on the heels of a bad week in polls for Obama that showed him first dropping to 39 percent nationwide in Gallup's daily tracking poll. Then another set of Gallup results Thursday showed only 26 percent of Americans approve of how Obama is handling the economy.
These numbers are a huge blow to Obama who won the state handily in 2008, and a significant drop in just a few weeks from when Quinnipiac University polled Pennsylvania voters and found the president with 43 percent job approval.
It isn't just PA where Obama is seeing news like this, it is across the country and across the demographic board where he is suffering a horrendous steady decline in support.
The trend for all 27 groups has been negative. And although the margins of error on this calculation (represented by the red bars in the chart) are fairly high, the decline has been statistically significant in 24 of 27 cases.
Three groups in particular stand out for having especially large declines. First is what Gallup terms “pure independent” voters, among whom Mr. Obama’s approval rating has dropped by 10 points since the start of the year. These pure independents are true swing voters; Gallup defines the category to exclude the many voters who call themselves independent but in fact lean toward one or another party and behave like partisans.
Is Obama "doomed" yet?
I do not think anyone can be 100% sure, but what is sure is that if something doesn't happen to change the pattern being seen of an Obama free fall in polls, steadily heading downward, if the economy doesn't completely turn around in the next six months, if unemployment continues to rise, then any slightly right of the middle GOP candidate can wipe him out in the 2012 election.
(Cartoon above by Nate Beeler, via Townhall)