Believe it or not, it’s only six months into President Obama’s second term. But already he seems to have alienated some of the key people who got him elected — and then re-elected — in the first place.
Because Obama has failed to deliver on key issues such as immigration reform and preventing student loan interest rates from going up, the president has managed to push away the people in his core demographic group — blacks, Hispanics and Millennials — as Paul Bedard of The Washington Examiner reported.
“These three groups all have high expectations and feel a sense of ownership because of their strong support,” John Zogby, a pollster, told The Examiner. “He is losing some of the strength he once enjoyed among groups that have formed the nucleus of his coalition.”
A CNN/ORC poll released in June coincided with Zogby’s claims that the president is losing youth. The study found that only 48 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds approved of his job performance, down from 63 percent the month before.
Zogby also told The Examiner that in addition to his inability to stop the doubling of student loan interest rates, Millennials blame Obama for the National Security Agency surveillance program, which he admitted to supporting.
Even those in attendance at Netroots Nation, a liberal conference held in June, were critical of the president’s inattention to young people’s concerns.
“We’re now talking about young people who voted for a president who didn’t deliver for them on a lot of the questions they’re concerned about,” Aimee Thorne-Thomsen, vice president for strategic partnerships at Advocates for Youth, said at the conference. Thorne-Thomsen cited immigration reform, climate control, LGBT equality and abortion as issues young people wanted the president to tackle more in his second term.
Among Hispanic voters, the president’s failure to deliver on comprehensive immigration reform has cost him. A Zogby Analytics poll released earlier this month shows that while Obama won his second term with 71 percent of Hispanics standing behind him, that number has now dwindled to 68 percent.
For black voters, it’s much the same. Ninety-three percent of African-Americans supported Obama’s re-election, but now only 84 percent of black voters still support the President, according to the Zogby Analytics poll.
This isn’t the first time the President’s rapport with African-Americans has been tested. Even before Obama was re-elected for a second term, he struggled with keeping the faith of the minority group over his jobs agenda — or lack thereof.
But regardless of Obama’s slowly dwindling fan base, the president still has “considerable juice” due to the fact that he is still ahead of his predecessors, according to Zogby. Obama still holds a 49 percent approval rating — which is three times higher than that of Congress — in the Zogby poll, thanks in part to a 52 percent approval rating among women.
“In short, this president is on the wrong side of a majority, but he still has more good will than his predecessors at their low points,” Zogby concluded in his report.
The Zogby Analytics poll of 919 likely voters nationwide was conducted July 12 to 13, 2013.
