By Brian Howey
TERRE HAUTE – I’ve traveled to more than 25 Indiana cities and towns this summer, from Angola to Rising Sun, from Michigan City to Peru and the one thing that is on everybody’s mind is jobs. Or as the 1992 Clinton campaign so succinctly summed it up, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
As we enter the dog days of August in this blistering summer of discontent, the Indiana and U.S. jobs pictures are strikingly familiar. Unemployment has hovered around 10 percent for months and the tentacles of the Great Recession of 2009-10 have ensnarled thousands of families. Dozens of my friends and acquaintances have been impacted economically in many ways.
With the homestretch of the 2010 campaign that starts on Labor Day just over the horizon, a new poll by Bellwether Research statistically backs up what I’ve been hearing: the jobs buck stops with President Obama and not Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. The fascinating aspect of this is that these two politicians – so similar in so many ways beyond party and ideology – may be intertwined as we close in on 2012.
Bellwether – which polls for Daniels – was in the field in Indiana on July 20-25 and interviewed 800 likely voters, calling both landlines and cell phones. It shows the national right/wrong track numbers at 30/57 percent, while the Indiana numbers were nearly inversed at 49/32 percent. President Obama’s approve/disapprove numbers stood at 44/50 percent (identical to many national polls), compared to 65/28 percent Daniels.
”Voters are making a clear distinction between President Obama and the federal government and Gov. Daniels,” said pollster Christine L. Matthews, who is a Kokomo native.
As for interest in the November election, 47 percent rated it “10″ on a 1 to 10 scale. Among those affiliated with the Tea Party movement, 65 percent rated it a “10″ as well as 61 percent of 2008 voters for presidential candidate John McCain. Ominously for Democrats, only 36 percent of 2008 Obama voters rated it a “10″ posing the same dilemma the party faced in 1994 when it lost Congress for the first time in 40 years. Base vote suppression is a very real dilemma for Democrats.
That dynamic is in play on a generic Indiana General Assembly question. Republicans held a 45-31 percent lead over Democrats – which control the Indiana House 52-48 – but among likeliest to vote (those participating in three out of the last four elections) the gap stood at 54-26 percent, and it was 35-24 percent favoring Republicans among independent voters. Among Tea Party affiliates, it stood at 72-8 percent favoring Republicans.
Daniels support stands out in several aspects. His approve/disapprove numbers among African-American voters stood at 69/18 percent, among Obama voters at 56/36 percent and among independents at 63/28 percent. “There isn’t a Republican in a state or in Congress who has those kinds of numbers among African-Americans,” said Matthews. It is that reason that Daniels is the center of presidential speculation, though a decision on that front won’t come until after the 2011 Indiana General Assembly.
A Daniels challenge to Obama would be fascinating. Both are excellent orators with vivid retail politics skills. They write their own speeches and TV ads and both have broken political molds within their respective parties. But they approach government from opposite ends of the spectrum (except for education reform), as their stances on health reforms and the auto bailouts revealed.
The Bellwether poll hits at a time when President Obama is aggressively pushing back. The BP oil spill crisis has ended. Obama is reminding voters that the economic woes, the Wall Street and auto bailouts began with President George W. Bush, along with a legacy $1.2 trillion deficit. He’s been in Michigan and Chicago touting the auto recovery, which has seen the Big 3 begin to turn profits. Obama said in Detroit last week that his new administration was backed into a corner “with very few choices.”
“If we had done nothing, not only were your jobs gone, but supplier jobs were gone, and dealership jobs were gone and communities that depend on them would have been wiped out,” Obama said to Chrysler workers. “You are proving the naysayers wrong, all of you. They thought it would be impossible for your company to make the kind of changes necessary to restore fiscal discipline and move towards viability. Today, for the first time since 2004, all three U.S. automakers are operating at a profit; first time in six years.”
Obama’s political wing – Organizing for America – has a strategy for getting back in the game. OFA has identified 333,000 first-time Indiana voters who came out in 2008. There are eight staffers in Indiana Democratic headquarters who are working to reengage them in congressional races involving Brad Ellsworth, Baron Hill, Joe Donnelly, Tom Hayhurst and Trent Van Haaften.
The lesson from 1994 is that base suppression can kill a majority in Congress and the Indiana House. And that the buck stops with the president and not the governor.
