Democrats walk out on Obama speech
WASHINGTON • President Barack Obama has belatedly hit the U.S. election campaign trail amid dismal personal approval ratings that have been reflected in even his own supporters walking out on him mid-speech.
With just two weeks until polling day and Democrats looking in danger of losing control of the Senate, the depths of Mr. Obama’s unpopularity was clear for him to see in one early rally in the state of Maryland.
As he urged a mostly African-American audience to get out and vote, it was reported that “a steady stream of people walked out of the auditorium” as he was speaking.
He was then heckled over the lack of progress on immigration reform.
“You’ve got to vote,” Mr Obama beseeched the crowd at the rally outside Washington on Sunday. “There are no excuses. The future is up to us.”
The campaign event was being held in support of Lt-Gov. Anthony Brown who is standing for governor. It was a stunning rejection of the president at an event staged just down the road from the Barack Obama Elementary School and in a district where 90% of the votes cast in the 2012 presidential election were for him.
Besieged by negative issues — from a sluggish economic recovery, to foreign policy setbacks and the mismanagement of the Ebola crisis — the president’s personal approval ratings have now been in negative territory for 17 months in succession. It was Mr. Obama presence on the top of the ballot that helped to get Democrats elected in several Republicanleaning states in 2008 — states that the party is now desperately struggling to defend six years later.
Republicans need to take back six Senate seats in order to regain control of the 100-member upper chamber, a result that would give them control of both houses of Congress and leave Mr. Obama, who is already verging on lame duck status, even further isolated.
“It’s both the map and the maths of the president’s low approval that is hurting Democrats,” said Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
“It just so happens that a large majority of key Senate races are in Republican states where he’s got a much lower job approval rating.
Mr. Sabato’s prediction model, which he updates daily, estimates that Republicans will win back the Senate, but he believes that Mr. Obama could still have made the difference.
“We predict Republicans are winning at the moment, but if Obama’s numbers were skyhigh — which they are not — then I think Democrats would hold the Senate.”
Pollsters have noted that Mr. Obama’s popularity has declined even with those key demographics that twice propelled him to the White House.
A poll last month found that women now disapprove of the president by a 50% to 44% margin, a near-reversal of Mr. Obama’s 55% to 44% advantage among women in the 2012 race, according to a Washington Post/ABC News survey.
Mr. Obama was in Chicago Monday, where he cast an early ballot in an effort to encourage Democrats to do the same, but it was a rare appearance in a campaign where he has been deployed almost exclusively to raise funds with celebrities and moneyed coastal elites.
Out in middle America, where wages are flat and Mr. Obama is accused of failing to deliver as much “hope and change” as he famously promised, Democrat candidates have been actively disassociating themselves from their party’s leader.
“I’m not Barack Obama,” said Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat candidate in Kentucky in a recent television advert that went on to spell out her disagreements with the president. So toxic has Mr. Obama’s name apparently become that when Ms. Lundergan Grimes was asked if she had ever actually voted for Mr. Obama, the 35-year-old lawyer refused to answer.