Accompanying a modest but real upward drift in the president’s approval rating in the last couple of weeks has been some cross-talk about which element of the electorate–particularly independents–might be responsible for it.
Well, TDS Contributor and Emory University politician scientist Alan Abramowitz put together a chart (published here by Brendan Nyhan) that compares approval ratings for Obama from various groups with their actual vote-shares for him in 2008, and finds that they are remarkably similar, and in many cases identical. Obama’s potential victory coalition in 2012 isn’t any mystery; it’s hiding in plain sight, in the coalition that elected him in 2008.