WASHINGTON — For months, optimists in the Democratic camp have argued the wave of anxious — sometimes angry — voters that swept Republicans to victory in 2010 had begun to subside, just in time for President Barack Obama’s run for re-election.
Wisconsin’s recall election put a torch to that idea.
In almost all respects, the voters who opted to keep Republican Gov. Scott Walker in office resembled those of 2010. The one significant difference was Tuesday’s turnout was larger.
Democrats continue to face problems with two critical voting groups, as Tuesday’s voting underscored, said Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic strategist based in Wisconsin.
“The under-30 vote has really cratered. ‘Yes we can’ has become ‘Maybe we can’t’ — and they’re getting hit with a bad job market and failed expectations,” Maslin said. And among white, working-class voters, who deserted the Democrats in droves in 2010, the party continues to struggle. “Obama has to do much better” among those voters than Democrats did Tuesday night in order to win re-election, he said — an opinion echoed by other Democratic advisers.
Exit polls of Tuesday’s voters back up those contentions. When Obama carried Wisconsin in 2008, people younger than 30 accounted for more than one-in-five voters; Obama carried almost two-thirds of their votes. Tuesday night, fewer than one-in-six Wisconsin voters were younger than 30 and the Democratic candidate, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, won just over half of them.
In 2008, Obama won 54 percent of white voters in Wisconsin, according to the exit polls. Tuesday night, Barrett, won only 43 percent of them. (Early versions of the exit poll underestimated the size of Walker’s vote, but the final exit poll numbers have been weighted to match the actual turnout.)
The results may not yet mean Obama is in trouble in Wisconsin — a state Democrats have won in presidential elections since 1988.
Indeed, the exit polls showed Tuesday’s voters would have gone for Obama by a seven-point margin. But that’s half the margin by which Obama carried the state in 2008, and the decline bodes poorly for other industrial-belt states that started out closer, particularly the region’s biggest prize, Ohio.
Obama benefits from a significant number of ticket-splitting voters in the state, pollster Charles Franklin of Marquette University Law School noted. “Wisconsin has quite a few swing voters whose heads do not explode from supporting Walker and Obama,” he said.
In the aftermath of the voting, Republican strategists tried to avoid sounding overconfident. Democrats, meanwhile, talked up reasons why Wisconsin’s results were peculiar to the state. They focused in particular on the financial advantage — more than two-to-one — that Walker and his backers had over Barrett and his allies. Many Democratic spokesmen referred to a 7-1 Walker financial advantage, a calculation that leaves out the substantial spending by outside groups on both sides.