Share

Email Print Comments Share

If there's one indicator of the difficulties bedeviling President Obama's re-election effort, it's Florida. To say the state is key to Obama winning another four years is something of an understatement. If you assume he loses the McCain states along with Indiana, New Hampshire and Florida this time around, he begins with a ceiling of 314 electoral votes. This gives Obama a very narrow window for his re-election bid, forcing him to come close to sweeping the remaining swing states.

So the president’s polling in the Sunshine State has to concern his campaign team. Consider the latest entry from Quinnipiac. The poll of registered voters shows him trailing likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney by three points, 46 to 43. That 43 percent number is especially troubling for the president because it matches up with his “solidly negative” job approval number of 42 percent, as well as with the 44 percent of Floridians who believe that he deserves a second term in office. In other words, his job approval among those voters who are undecided is probably very, very low.

Additionally, this is a poll of registered voters. Later on, we’ll get a better sense of how Obama stands among the actual electorate when pollsters begin to screen for likely voters. Right now, 56 percent of Republicans say that they’re more likely to vote than usual, compared with 29 percent of Democrats. This yawning “enthusiasm gap” suggests that the president’s deficit among actual participants in the general election is probably more substantial.

In the RCP Average, he clings to a 0.2 percent lead in Florida. He has to hope that Quinnipiac is the outlier in the average, and not NBC/Marist (which showed him with a substantial lead).