Last week, Quinnipiac released a poll for three states, including Ohio. The top line of the poll has bad news for President Obama. He would lose to either Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich if the election were held today. When you look deeper into the results, the news only gets worse for the president. We’ll also peer deeper into the poll and discuss Governor Kasich’s numbers as well.
With less than a year to the election, Barack Obama looks to be in deep trouble in Ohio. His job approval numbers are a dismal 41 approve/55 disapprove (-14) among all registered voters. It gets even worse for him. With independents he is at 38/57 (-19) and nearly 2 out of 3 Ohio men, 33/64 (-31), disapprove of how Obama is doing his job as president. Just one month ago, Obama was at -6 in Ohio, so he has fallen 8 points further behind.
The numbers for Governor Kasich are nothing to write home about, either. However, the 2 men are in different situations. Governor Kasich has been on the receiving end of a $30 million dollar campaign of lies funded by national unions, who painted everybody in favor of government union reform as a rich, fatcat destroyer of the middle class. $30 million is a lot of propaganda, and it convinced Ohio voters to opt for cuts and layoffs instead of reform. The governor also had to come in and make tough, but necessary choices to balance the state budget in the wake of an $8 billion shortfall left by the previous administration who decided not to deal with the state’s budget problems.
Right now, Kasich’s number in the same poll are 38 approve/50 disapprove (-12). Democrats have been pushing a narrative that Kasich will hurt the GOP’s chances in the state, and help Obama. But the numbers tell a different story. Obama is still further under water, and more Ohioans disapprove of Barack Obama than disapprove of Governor Kasich.
Looking at last month again, Kasich has gone from -15 to -12. So he is currently moving in a positive direction, while over the same period, with the same people, Obama is trending in the opposite direction.
The governor hasn’t even completed a year in office yet, and 2 years from now, voters will have a better chance to look back and decide whether he made a difference where he said he would: Ohio jobs. There’s has been a lot of good news coming in lately, due to the administration’s efforts. As good things continue to happen as a result of the governor’s focus, his standing with Ohio should only improve.
It’s quite the opposite with Barack Obama. Ohio has seen almost 3 years of what Democrats are trying to pass off as “leadership”. They’ve seen deficits in the trillions, and the largest explosion in federal debt in history. They’ve seen Obama pass “stimulus” spending that failed, only to come back and ask for more stimulus. They’ve seen him blame everyone in the world for his failures, except for himself. John Kasich won’t be the person on voters’ minds in November 2012. Barack Obama will be. Ohioans have had 3 years to see what Barack Obama has done to for America, and they don’t like what they see.
