Obama Loses Support from Important Swing Demographic, White Women

First he lost young voters, now white women. Over Obamacare.

Polling provided to National Journal by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that white women have soured considerably on the law, especially in the month since its botched rollout. The skepticism runs especially deep among blue-collar women....

The Kaiser poll, which has been conducted monthly since Obamacare’s inception, shows the law has never been a big hit with white women. But this group’s opinions took a sharply negative turn in the November results.

According to Kaiser, 40 percent of college-educated white women hold a “very unfavorable” view of the law—10 points higher than a month ago. An additional 10 percent view the law “somewhat unfavorably.” A month ago, those two groups together totaled just 42 percent.

That’s not damning in and of itself, but this is the one slice of the white electorate where Democrats usually perform well. President Obama won 46 percent of the group in 2012, and even that was an underwhelming showing compared with recent Democratic presidential candidates.

And that’s not all. Democrats should be far more worried about white women who do not have a higher education. The numbers are astounding: In the latest Kaiser poll, 50 percent have a “very unfavorable” view of the law—9 points higher than in October. An additional 13 percent view it “somewhat unfavorably.” Indeed, antipathy among blue-collar white women runs even deeper than the most conservative white demographic group, blue-collar white men (59 percent of whom hold an unfavorable view, Kaiser found).

Remarkably, only 16 percent of blue-collar white women have a favorable view of Obamacare. They disapprove of it by a 4-1 ratio.

Democrats typically do not win the white women vote, but they do fairly well, picking up somewhere between, say, 40-45% of that large section of the vote. They lose white women, but narrowly enough that minority women (strongly Democratic) push the whole of the women's vote to the Democrats.

Because white women make up such a large fraction of the voting population, a few percentage points shifted from Democrats to Republicans will have an impact at the ballot box.

Maybe pro-Obamacare Happy Hours will do the trick.

posted by Ace at 01:43 PM

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