@BillRM,
BillRM wrote:
I would not if a was you count on the black community voting for the candidate of the KKK oh sorry I mean the GOP/tea party due to them being unhappy with Obama.
You must be buying into the idea that black are stupid by their very nature as stupid in fact as members of the tea party or even more stupid to think otherwise.
The significance of Obama's declining support among African-Americans does not rest with the possibility of large numbers of their membership voting for the Republican challenger in 2012. While I do believe there would a noticable shift in African-American votes if Cain was running, the vast majority of black voters will not cross party lines because they are dissatisfied with the first black president in American history.
Of course it is the same case with dissatisfied voters who self-identify as Gay & Lesbians, Hispanics, Environmentalists, Pacifists etc. The real danger, in terms of ballots cast is that the disaffected will stay home or cast their vote for fringe third party candidates as an act of protest.
Every vote not cast for Obama will not be a vote cast for his opponent, but he needs and wants all of the votes he was able to secure in 2008
Obama has lost support in virtually all of the voting blocs he was able to count on in 2008: women, the aged, hispanics, young people. I could be wrong but I don't believe there is a single bloc in which he has substantially gained support, unless it is Investors in Green Energy
Even the strength of support from the labor vote is uncertain, and with all of the contraversial actions taken by State Governors and State Legislatures as respects the rights of publice service union employees, this is pretty amazing. Maybe the private worker union members don't feel the same degree of fraternity with their counterparts in the public workplace because they realize it's their taxes that have to be raised to continue or increase their benefits.
The Union Bosses of course will stick with the president (what choice do they have?) but the value of Union support is more about the money they can pour into a campaign as opposed to the number of votes.
You're absolutely right that much of the disaffection from former Obama supporters is not because he is not acting more like a Republican and so they will not be gravitating towards the Republican candidate in November 2012. Many of them perceive a Republican being elected in 2012 as a looming catastrophe and will very likely hold their noses and vote for what they believe is the lesser of two evils.
There is a reason though why successful campaigns are intensly focused on strategies to "get out the vote," why Democrats don't like to see clouds in the skies on Election Day and there have been restrictions of one sort or another on the sale of alcohol on Election Day throughout our history.
In order for there to be historical Democrat voting turnout, nature and municipalities have to cooperate, but more importantly, there must be a historical nature to the election. Certainly in terms of the latter, 2008 presented an election of significant historical proportions.
I would argue that the stakes may be even greater in 2012 than they were in 2008, but there is no way that the upcoming election will generate the same degree of interest as did the one in 2008. Even if Obama was doing a good job his campaign would be accounting for an expected fall off in voter turnout in 2012, but to the degree that he is feeding Democrat voter apathy (in the sense of not believing a vote matters as opposed to not caring about issues), he is in trouble.
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