Obama is losing white voters

Washington Post:

The 2012 election is shaping up to be more polarized along racial lines than any presidential contest since 1988, with President Obama experiencing a steep drop
in support among white voters from four years ago.

At this stage in 2008, Obama trailed Republican John McCain by seven percentage points among white voters. Even in victory, Obama ended up losing white voters by 12 percentage points, according to that year’s exit poll.

But now, Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points, trailing Republican Mitt Romney 60 percent to 37 percent among whites, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll. That presents a significant hurdle for the president — and suggests that he will need to achieve even larger margins of victory among women and minorities, two important parts of the Democratic base, to win reelection.

Overall, Romney has edged ahead in the contest, garnering 50 percent of likely voters for the first time in the campaign, according to the Post-ABC poll. As Romney hits 50 percent, the president stands at 47 percent, his lowest tally since before the national party conventions.

The three-point edge gives Romney his first apparent — but not statistically significant — advantage in the national popular vote. The challenger has a clear nine-point lead when it comes to whom voters trust to handle the economy, which has long been the central issue of the contest. He has also effectively neutralized what has been a consistent fallback for Obama: economic empathy.

Romney’s momentum in these areas comes from improvements against the president among white voters.

The slippage among whites is something of a setback for Obama, who campaigned on bridging the racial divide in his election and has sought to minimize rifts that have arisen in his presidency. Although Democrats typically win minorities and fare worse among white voters than their Republican rivals, Obama outpaced previous losing Democratic candidates with both groups.

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The erosion of support Obama has experienced since his muted performance in the first presidential debate has been particularly acute among white men, whites without college degrees and white independents, the new tracking poll found.

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The NY Times points to another demographic that Obama cannot close the sale on:

 

Crucial Subset: Female Voters Still Deciding
While female voters generally tend to favor President Obama, that cannot be said of white women without college degrees, a subset known — in this race — as waitress moms.

One of the interesting pieces of information the Post kind of glides by in the 2008 results is the difference between the polling and the actual results among white voters.   Obama actually performed five points worse than the polling among white voters.  That suggest that many of them were reluctant to say they opposed him for fear of being called a racist.  The fear is certainly justified if you catch the rantings on MSNBC which suggest that all opposition to Obama is based on race.  They are so wed to their liberal bias that they cannot imagine that someone would object to liberal policies.