Doh!: 71 Percent Of Obama Supporters Regret Re-Electing The President, But 79 Percent Would Do It Again

 

February 19, 2014 by Sam Rolley

PHOTOS.COM

More than 70 percent of Americans who voted to re-elect President Barack Obama said in a recent poll that they regret helping the President remain in the White House.

A recent Economist/YouGov.com pollconducted to test media hype that 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney could make a political comeback in a future Presidential election revealed the Obama voter remorse.

In answering the question “Do you regret voting for Barack Obama?”:

• 71 percent of overall respondents said yes and 26 percent no.
• 55 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independent voters said yes.
• 80 percent of white voters said yes and 100 percent of Hispanics agreed, while the majority of black (61 percent) said no.

Despite their regret, most Obama voters (79 percent) said they would vote for the President again if the election were held today.

The polling data also did not spell much good news for Romney if he is planning yet another White House bid.

Via the poll:

In YouGov research conducted from February 6th-7th, we went about it in a slightly different way, asking people who voted for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama whether they would do it again. We found an ostensibly similar picture: 90 percent of people who voted for Romney would do it again, compared to only 79 percent of Obama voters who would.

Clearly Romney fares better, although he had fewer voters to begin with. As a proportion of the voters each of them actually received in 2012 (66 million for Obama and 61 million for Romney), the GOP candidate ends up with 55 million votes retained to Obama’s 52 million. Not exactly a wipeout. It’s also unclear for any poll that hypothetically revisits 2012 how much it says about renewed hope for Mitt Romney — who has notably been liberated from the scrutiny of a presidential campaign — rather than about dissatisfaction with an incumbent president who has spent the last year defending his administration over leaks, scandals and Obamacare roll-outs.

The Economist/YouGov.com poll did manage to find one clear winner in its data, noting that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has held steady at 50 percent favorable to 43 percent unfavorable among respondents over the past four weeks.