One of the big talking points about the election last week was that Democrats lost independent voters. But a new survey from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner reminds us that they weren’t the only ones the Democrats missed on election night.
The GQR survey of Virginia and New Jersey registered voters (not all of whom voted in the election) confirmed what Ed Kilgore posited the other day: that the story of the 2009 election was the poor turnout of the “Obama Coalition.”
GQR conducted the survey for Women’s Voices. Women Vote, an organization that focuses on political outreach to historically underrepresented groups in the electorate: unmarried women, younger voters, Latinos, and African Americans. GQR dubs this coalition the “Rising American Electorate” (RAE), a group that turned out in historic numbers last year for Barack Obama but trickled to the polls this year. The ones that did vote overwhelmingly chose Democrats Jon Corzine in New Jersey (by 25 points) and Creigh Deeds in Virginia (by 27 points). It’s just that there weren’t enough of them to win the election for Democrats.
The problem facing Democrats is how to motivate the RAE next year. Polls show that Obama is still well-liked personally and that his approval ratings are holding up, despite the nagging recession. But Obama isn’t up for election next year – Democrats are. And while the Republican base is fired up, the Democratic base shows no sign of rousing from its slumber. Couple that with signs that independents are starting to inch to the right and you have a recipe for a bad 2010 for Dems.
