The Importance of Getting Out the Vote

Despite his attempts at making his vision for the country known, the American public views President Barack Obama as being indecisive in terms of the economy.  In a recent New York Times/CBS News Poll, 56 percent of people do not believe that the president has offered a clear plan to save jobs.  Just 38 percent of Americans believe that he does have a clear plan, with 6 percent unsure of the issue.  What makes these numbers so devastating is that Obama has been selling his economic plan to the public for over a month and a half; he has traveled thousands of miles, and yet the public remains unconvinced.  According to the New York Times, the electorate is in favor of many of the individual components of the plan that the president has set forth.  For unknown reasons, however, the plan is failing to gain support as a whole.  One possible reason for this is the overall distrust of the government, in conjunction with the persistently high unemployment rates.

This general lack of trust in the federal government may not necessarily affect the president’s reelection chances, as it would tend to disrupt the campaign of the GOP presidential candidate as well.  Also as reported by the New York Times, statistics show that the Democratic president is maintaining support from within the black community despite the federal government’s inability to quell the economic downturn.  Although many in the nation’s capital believe that Obama’s support in the black community has weakened, Helene Cooper asserts in her article entitled “Black Voters’ Support for Obamais Steady and Strong” that both public opinion polls and individual accounts support the fact that the president is just as likely to receive support from that community as he was in 2008.  However, the difficulty will lay in the ability of the Democrats to spur enthusiasm among the electorate; that is, simply because the black community will continue to support the president in 2012, it does not mean that the “atypical” voters who contributed to the previous election will once again turn out to vote next year.

Therefore, the $70+ million already raised by President Obama for reelection will certainly be allocated to a large get-out-the-vote operation – called, quite creatively, Operation Vote – in key states like Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia.  Obama campaign staffers assert that new voters can yet be reached as well, so there is a great pool of potential voters that the Democrats could tap into.  Numerically, overwhelming support from the black population in states like North Carolina is necessary for a Democratic victory, which barely happened in 2008 – even with 300,000 black votes, President Obama won the state by a mere 14,000 votes.  As a result, Operation Vote is seeking votes not just from the African American community, but from the Hispanic electorate as well.  Funding for the campaign will not likely be an issue, so regional staff managers for Obama will have over a year to extract as many votes as possible from key areas.  Whoever the GOP contender will be, it will be the challenge of a lifetime to acquire the necessary electoral votes in order to take back the White House.