Last week, President Obama’s approval rating reached its lowest point. In a Gallup survey, only 38 percent of respondents said they approve of how he is handling his job. And during Obama’s presidency, his approval rating sunk to that mark seven times.
Though his approval slightly floated upward in the past week, now averaging around 41.8 percent according to a Real Clear Politics average, this is not a good sign for the president, or any Democrat. Considering the fast-approaching 2014 midterm elections, that is especially true. His approval rating even remains low among the 18-to 29-year-old demographic, the group that has been the most outspoken of Obama’s supporters, second only to non-whites.
His “Hope” and “Change We Can Believe In” slogans, once so powerful among young voters on our campus and across the country, have faded into a sad joke.
Now, graduating college students emerge to find a bleak job market that is ever-so-slowly improving. What’s worse is that for the college graduating class of 2014, the unemployment rate almost doubled the national average for all but the most sought-after majors of business, engineering and accounting. Those jobs are nearly recession-proof as workers in those fields are always needed. Those with other degrees face a much stiffer job market, and students are now almost expected to move back home with their parents after graduation, as many simply have no means to support themselves.
An unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is a marked improvement from the 10 percent high reached in 2010 during the depths of the great recession. However, the true state of the economy is slightly skewed because the labor participation rate has declined due to people retiring or simply giving up on job hunting.
The president’s handling of the crises in Ukraine and Iraq is widely perceived as negative and also contributed to his low approval rating. However, it is the economy’s lackluster recovery that is really turning the youngest voting demographic against him. They are more concerned about their own lives than they are foreign countries, and that’s making a real difference. The hopeful ideology that once characterized Obama’s politics is being beaten down by his shortfalls in the real world.
Especially with the younger demographic slipping from the president, it does not look good for his party come the November general elections. People are going to vote for whomever they see as having a real solution to the plethora of problems facing the nation, not dreams. In 2008, the nation was ready to dream and in 2012 they tried to revive that idea. But as we can see from the polling data, the Obama faithful have wavered.
Cameron Macko is an intern at The State News. Reach him at c.macko@statenews.com.
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