According to the Susan Page story, these unlikely voters will hurt President Obama a lot more than Mitt Romney since they tend to be people who would otherwise favor the Democrat over the Republican candidate.
But read closely and the story reveals a different problem for Obama. It isn’t that these voters are too busy or don’t care about voting, they say they just don’t like Obama that much.
“I don’t think Obama helped us as much as he promised,” John Harrington, 52, a heavy-equipment operator from Farmington, Minn., explained. Harrington voted for Obama in 2008. Now he says he’s unlikely to vote for him again.
Then there are people who like what Obama has done and still won’t vote for him.
Lisa Goicochea is a 19-year-old student at LaGuardia Community College in New York City who favors Obama. “I like that he’s been trying to go through with the Obamacare, which will benefit a lot of people,” she says, but she still isn’t going to vote. “It doesn’t matter,” she says.
Now, the survey also suggests that Obama’s attacks on Romney painting him as a wealthy man who will hurt the middle-class is working.
“I really don’t know much about [Romney], but from what I hear, he’s all about putting taxes on the middle-class people, and I’ve heard that he’s put his money in overseas accounts,” says Jamie Palmer, a 35-year-old mother of three from St. Joseph, Mo. “I think that’s wrong.”
But Palmer isn’t planning to vote either, so it could be that the attacks are only going to keep people who would otherwise vote for Obama away from the polls.
As Palmer says of the candidates, “they say the same things; they make promises; they don’t keep them. It’s ridiculous. If I vote, nothing is going to come of it. It’s just going to be like it is right now.”
Doesn’t sound like she’s in love with right now, does it? And President Obama owns right now.