Obama’s Hot Election-Year Issues Are Exactly The Ones Voters Don’t Care About

May 7, 2014 by Ben Bullard

Polls are easy-come, easy-go, but last week’s Pew/USA Today poll gauging the mood of voters ahead of the midterm elections covered a lot of ground. The upshot, USA Today found, is that Republicans stand to gain Congressional seats this November.
One takeaway that may have gotten lost in the ensuing coverage is this interesting tidbit: President Obama’s focus on a political cocktail of immigration reform and climate change to kick off the summer-long campaign season is at or near the very bottom of the list of important issues that voters say will influence their decisions at the ballot box.
Worse for Democrats, their figurehead stands to lose them votes on the three top issues that voters do place at the top of their list of priorities – jobs, health care and the Federal deficit.
Think of it as an inverse pyramid: as voters’ concern about a given issue goes up, the President’s attention to that issue (or his success in attempting to address it) goes down.
On jobs – the top priority for 27 percent of voters: 800,000 people dropped out of the workforce in the latest BLS monthly report, a statistic that magically lowered to official unemployment rate by discounting that number from the pool of people the government considers to be “unemployed.” Health care
On health care – the top priority for 21 percent of voters: Despite the Administration’s recent efforts at claiming victory in the Obamacare sign-up period, insurers are now saying that many of the reported 8 million enrollees may be “duplicates,” and that anywhere between 10 and 20 percent of unique enrollments represent people who never paid their premiums. Obamacare is a mess of a talking point for Democrats in their respective local districts, with officials like Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) urging Democrats to highlight it in their campaigns, even as embattled Democrats like Congressmen Joe Garcia of Florida and Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona run campaign ads taking on Obama like he’s the bad guy.
Meanwhile, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz pretends Obamacare’s time in the spotlight has already come and gone, and that there’s nothing left for voters to see – in direct contradiction of what voters told the pollsters last week.
On the Federal deficit – the top priority for 19 percent of voters: Like the BLS unemployment statistics, the recent report from the Congressional Budget Office that the Federal deficit is at its lowest point in 70 years is a numbers-massaging game that many voters aren’t buying. The CBO calculates the deficit by using the U.S. GDP as a baseline – and the GDP took a swan dive in the late Bush years and has been crawling since then. Forbes had an excellent article last month that further explains why Obama, of all people, knows he can’t play up a Federal deficit statistic as a point of pride for his Administration.
How did voters rate immigration reform and climate change on the to-do list for Congress? Only six percent named immigration as their top priority – the lowest figure measured in the poll.
As for climate change? It didn’t even make the list.

http://personalliberty.com/obamas-ho...ers-dont-care/