Technically in politics, it's not how you win an election, but how you win re-election. Recent chattering about health care and abortion and open-carry laws aside, what people---and young people in particular---have wanted most these past three years are jobs, and money, and debt relief.
They really haven't quite gotten enough of them:
Obama’s approval rating among college students dropped to 46 percent last December from 58 percent in November 2009, according to a Harvard University poll. Fifty percent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 said they would “definitely” be voting, an 11 percentage-point decrease from the fall of 2007. A third of respondents said they approved of Democrats in Congress, and 24 percent approved of Republicans. Just 12 percent said the nation was headed in the right direction
“The turnout will not be great,” Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate in Washington, said in a phone interview. The war in Afghanistan, a lack of progress on closing Guantanamo Bay and a dismal job picture taint Obama’s prospects, he said. The unemployment rate among 18- to 24-year-olds was 16.3 percent at the end of last year, the highest since record-keeping began in 1948, according to a February Pew Research Center report.
I hope the administration can figure out how to galvanize some constituency of its winning voter bloc from four years ago. With GOP state legislatures working overtime to deprive millions of Democratic voters of the franchise, I don't see how they can stand the double-whammy of Teabilly vote suppression in states like Ohio and Indiana and Pennsylvania and Florida and a depressed youth vote. And yes, I know the President's poll numbers look pretty good for now---and Romney is such a detestable figure, he may be simply unelectable---but there's a long way to go between now and November, and until those voters actually show up at the polls, we can only consider Obama's current polling edge a hypothetical margin.
---Vitelius
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