Obama's uphill battle to win Democrat votes.

[wehotex]

Originally Posted by rikoshaprl

Obama's pathetic showing in the Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia primaries with less than 60% of the vote from his own party shows he will have an uphill battle for re-election.
Sean Trende, writing in Realclearpolitics.com, notes that the only presidents who have "received less than 60 percent of the vote in any primary were: Taft '12, Coolidge '24, Hoover '32, Johnson '68, Ford '76, Carter '80 and Bush '92." All but Coolidge were defeated for re-election.

He has lost a good portion of the Catholic vote with his war on religion. His support among the younger voters is slipping due to their high unemployment numbers. His phoney GOP war on women has backfired and his war on capitalism will cost him Wall St votes and money. He has abandoned the middle class working man in favor of treehuggers. The Keystone pipeline in one example, killing coal is another.

Did you really expect him to win any of those states in the first place? It's hard to compare today with past eras because we have become such a sharply partisan country as compared to any time in the country's history.

[rikoshaprl]

Originally Posted by wehotex

Did you really expect him to win any of those states in the first place? It's hard to compare today with past eras because we have become such a sharply partisan country as compared to any time in the country's history.

First, we have always been partisan. Some times in history we have been more partisan than now. For example look at the duel between Hamilton and Burr.
Second, we are not talking about different parties in these primary elections, just democrats not supporting their president.

[Randomstudent]

Originally Posted by rikoshaprl

What you are showing is a map of how many republicans are in these states. How does that matter in a DEMOCRAT primary?

No, that is a map of how the states voted generally in 2008 vs 2004. I thought that would have been clear from the title "US presidential election voting shifts from 2004-2008", but I guess my expectations about rightwing literacy were probably too high.

What I said is those states have large Democratic parties at the state level, but are transitioning to GOP nationally. Thus you have a lot of people who are registered Democrats for state politics, but are in fact DINOs in regards to national politics. This is clear if you look particularly at some of those West Virginia counties like Mingo and Logan where Democrats have a massive registration advantage, but McCain won. To put this into perspective WV governor Tomblin won the counties with 85% and 92% respectively Simply put those people did not vote for Obama in the 2008 primary, they did not vote for him in the 2008 election and in the grand scheme of things they are pretty much irrelevant.