Great White Way

Well, this is some depressing stuff.  Pew Research's latest poll on President Obama's approval rating has some pretty...what's the word I'm looking for...divided?  Divided breakdowns.  Total, he's at 46% approve, 46% disapprove.  The crosstabs get pretty hinky, but it's the last section on white poll respondents that's a whopper:


My observations:  I'm honestly surprised that among white Republicans, the president's approval numbers are even 6%.  Also, not surprised at all to see one in 5 white Dems unhappy with President Obama.

But to see working class white folks 2 to 1 against this President is astonishing.

If you make less than $75k a year and you're white, you pretty much despise this President, and for the life of me I can't explain why.  I mean, I can postulate.  President Obama has a very positive approval rating among white college graduate women, 55-40.  But 22% among white men without a college degree?  Are you serious?

TNR's Nate Cohn seems to think this isn't quite a complete disaster for POTUS.

But these numbers also show the difficulty of winning with gains among white working class voters alone. Despite Obama’s monumental collapse among white working-class voters, his approval rating is only at minus-5 among registered voters. That might seem like a silly complaint, since the GOP would gladly take a 5-point win in a presidential election. But the GOP won’t sweep the white working-class voters who supported Obama in 2012 but now disapprove of his performance. More than half of them are self-identified Democrats—and it’s tough to imagine that most won’t return to the next Democratic nominee. And if these Democratic white working-class voters ultimately come home, then Democrats would still win, narrowly, on the strength of their resilient "new coalition" of minorities and well-educated whites.

Additional gains among white working class voters will almost certainly be part of the next winning GOP coalition. But it’s hard to win with narrow gains concentrated among a single demographic group. At some point, the GOP will reach the point of diminishing returns, where they start running into the problem of ideology and partisan loyalties. That seems to have happened (at least in this poll) in the South, where Obama hasn’t lost very much additional ground among white voters since last November’s election. And the Electoral College discourages narrow gains: The GOP needs to win back states like Virginia, Colorado, and Florida, where there are fewer white working-class voters than the national average. So it would be prudent for Republicans to broaden their appeal across the board, even if the newest polls suggest they have a particularly fruitful opportunity among downscale whites.

And while the President's approval rating is down sharply among white voters...it's up 8 points with Latino voters.

Food for thought.