Michael Barone‘s latest column focuses on the Obama team’s strategy for winning re-election.
Now his strategists feel obliged to pick which groups he’ll concentrate on to get back up to 50 percent. What’s interesting is that his demographic strategists and his issue strategists seem to be eyeing different groups.
The demographic targeters, in their quest for 270 electoral votes, have decided to concentrate on traditionally Republican states that Obama carried in 2008, according to a report in the New York Times. They note that some of these states — e.g., Colorado, Virginia, and North Carolina — have above-average percentages of college-educated voters, who trended strongly toward Obama. …
… But unfortunately for these strategists, recent polls don’t show Obama doing much better in Virginia (45–50), North Carolina (45–51), or Colorado (46–50). The Obamaites point to Sen. Michael Bennet’s 2010 victory in Colorado as a model to follow. But Bennet won by only 48 to 46 percent, and the Democratic governor won with just 51 percent against split opposition. And Republicans carried the state’s popular vote for the House.
There’s also an enormous gulf between the so-called Colorado strategy and Obama’s stance on issues. It’s not clear that lambasting Republicans for not raising taxes on millionaires and corporate jets is going to win votes or rally the enthusiasm of currently disappointed college-educated and young voters. …
… It’s not so clear, either, that bashing millionaires and corporate-jet owners is going to rekindle the enthusiasm of young voters and Latinos discouraged after months of joblessness. They may remember that spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the 2009 stimulus package didn’t do much good.
