A new poll conducted by the political news web site Politico finds just 26 percent of Americans say they believe pro-abortion President Barack Obama will be re-elected in 2012.
The direction of the country and the economy account for the low numbers with 82 percent of those who say Obama will not be re-elected saying the country is headed in the wrong direction while 81 percent who say the economy is headed in the wrong direction say Obama won’t get another term.The quarter of the public who consider Obama’s reelection as probable say by a 3-1 margin the economy will turn around between now and November 2012.
“They are the outliers of the electorate, suggesting that the president has a lot more work to do to get back on track for a second term,” Democratic pollster Mark Penn, who took the poll for Politico, noted.
“It should be clear now that the public believes it sent a very clear message to the president that it wants new policies — particularly when it comes to government spending and health care. The public wants him to move back to the center and focus on the economy,” he added.
Two other Democratic pollsters also have bad news for Obama.
Patrick Caddell, who was a pollster and senior adviser to President Jimmy Carter and E. Schoen, a pollster who worked for President Bill Clinton, says Obama should not seek a second term because he will not be re-elected.
Patrick Caddell, who was a pollster and senior adviser to President Jimmy Carter and E. Schoen, a pollster who worked for President Bill Clinton, says Obama should not seek a second term because he will not be re-elected.
“President Obama must decide now how he wants to govern in the two years leading up to the 2012 presidential election,” they write in a Washington Post oped. “It is clear that the president is still trying to reach a resolution in his own mind as to what he should do and how he should do it.”
“Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones,” they continue. “To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012.”
“If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose,” they add.
Obama himself once said to Diane Sawyer: “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.”
“He now has the chance to deliver on that idea,” they added. “Forgoing another term would not render Obama a lame duck.”
