Open Thread: Democrats Losing Voters in 2012 Battleground States

December 8th, 2011 10:15 AM

It seems President Obama's speeches on class warfare, big government, and comments on American laziness haven't worked in his favor. According to ABC News, the number of registered Democrats in battleground states for next year's election has dropped by nearly one million. Some of his supporters contend that Obama will still win the independent vote, where many of those Democrats have gone.

Do you think Obama can win the independent vote in 2012? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The analysis from ABC on the drop in registered Democrats suggests Obama is losing huge numbers of voters in key battleground states:

A report released today by the centrist think-tank Third Way showed that more than 825,000 voters in eight key battleground states have fled the Democratic Party since Obama won election in 2008.

“The numbers show that Democrats’ path to victory just got harder,” said Lanae Erickson, the report’s co-author. “We are seeing both an increase in independents and a decrease in Democrats and that means the coalition they have to assemble is going to rely even more on independents in 2012 than it did in 2008.” [...]

In eight states that will be must-wins in 2012 – Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina and Pennsylvania – Democrats lost 5.4 percent of their registered voters while Republicans lost 3.1 percent. The number of independent voters in those states jumped 3.4 percent.

While the independent vote could possibly still sway to Obama, the election results of 2010 would suggest otherwise.

Obama snagged 52 percent of unaffiliated voters in 2008, but those independents flocked to Republicans in the 2010 midterms with 56 percent opting for a GOP candidate. Between 2008 and 2010, there was a 27-point shift in which party independents chose.

Could this all be a result of Obama's insistance that we need more government? After all, in his Tuesday speech, he said "...they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty. Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked."