The cover of Tuesday’s edition of The Washington Post’s commuter tabloid Express reads “How Obama will need to lead differently if Republicans gain control of the Senate.”
Jena McGregor’s article inside carried the headline “Obama’s turn to change.” McGregor, who writes for the Post's "On Leadership" blog, noticed an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed two-thirds of voters want Obama to change:
This means that if Obama wants his last two years to have any real success — and if a GOP-led Congress is indeed the result of the midterms — the president will need to lead differently. Americans already want to see that change: Some two-thirds of registered voters participating in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Monday said Obama should initiate either "a great deal of change" or "quite a bit of change" to his leadership style.
It wasn't just style, it was substance. The question was “How much change would you like to see in the direction in which President Obama has been leading the country?” Forty-five percent selected “A great deal,” while 22 percent picked “Quite a bit.” (Another 23 percent said “Just some.”) Monday’s Journal newspaper carried this result in a box at the bottom of page A4, but not in the front-page story by Patrick O’Connor.
For the Journal’s Washington Wire, reporter Reid Epstein underlined how the results aren’t pleasing to Obama fans:
Not surprisingly, Republicans – 87% — would most like Mr. Obama to change how he operates, but even Democrats are unsatisfied with the president’s direction. Among Mr. Obama’s own party, 47% said they want substantial change in his direction. Only 39% said he should make just some change. Another 12% of Democrats said there should be not that much change in his direction.
If it wasn’t clear already that voter disenchantment with the president is bleeding into votes for GOP congressional candidates, 25% of people who say they want Republicans to have control of Congress say it is specifically to protest the performance of Mr. Obama’s administration – a figure 10 percentage points higher than at this point in the 2010 election cycle. Only 26% of those who want Democrats to control Congress say their vote is because of the Obama administration’s actions.
On Fox News on Monday night, host Greta Van Susteren was amazed: "Forty-seven percent of Democrats say the president needs to substantially alter how he approaches his job. I think that's like the dagger. I mean, that's horrible, a dagger in the chest to him."
But NBC News hasn’t found this poll question at all. On Sunday’s Nightly News, Chuck Todd kept selling a tightening “up for grabs” midterm forecast and avoiding the change question:
TODD: Surprisingly, Democrats are pulling even with Republicans, Democratic enthusiasm is up for voting. Republicans still have a narrow enthusiasm lead, but it shows you this maybe tighter than we thought. And look at this, all of the coverage of ISIS and Ebola, we wondered what will be on the minds of voters when they go in the voting booth. Well, they told us domestic issues, like the economy, health care, job, Social Security. Seventy-seven percent said that would matter most. Just less than one in five voters said Ebola and other foreign policy challenges. By the way, the top two issues of importance, Lester, were jobs and the economy and gridlock. That's why Tuesday seems a little more up for grabs.
Todd (and Natalie Morales on Monday’s Today) failed to note that the while likely voters were split 46-45 percent on who should control Congress (with a slight edge to the GOP), the same poll before the wave in 2010 came up 43 percent Republican, 49 percent Democrat.
