Gallup reports a good number for Democrats:
Registered voters are nearly twice as likely to say Barack Obama, rather than Mitt Romney, is the more likable of the two presidential candidates. Obama's 60% to 31% advantage on this characteristic is the largest for either candidate on five separate dimensions tested in a May 1-2 USA Today/Gallup poll.Another Gallup number is not so good:
Thirty-two percent of 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. workforce were underemployed in April, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment. This is up from 30.1% in March and is slightly higher than the 30.7% of a year ago.At the Daily Beast, Ben Jacobs reports an ominous number from Wisconsin:
Tuesday was a bad night for the labor movement. In Wisconsin, with only token opposition, incumbent Gov. Scott Walker got 97 percent of the vote in the Republican primary, and almost as many votes were cast for him than in the entire Democratic primary combined. This is a bad sign for Democrats. The percentage of the vote Walker received seemed more appropriate for Mugabe than the former county executive of Milwaukee.At The Washington Post, Rachel Weiner reports a bad number from West Virginia:
Keith Judd, who is serving a 17 1/2-year prison sentence for extortion at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, took 41 percent of the vote in West Virginia’s Democratic primary Tuesday night — 72,000 votes to Obama’s 106,000. He would qualify for convention delegates, if anyone had signed up to be a Judd delegate. (No one did.)
How did Judd get so many votes?
It’s likely not his past careers as a superhero and religious leader. Or his passionate FEC report ramblings. Simply put, West Virginia does not like Obama.Alex Roarty writes at The Atlantic:
The overwhelming North Carolina vote to define marriage as legal only between a man and woman is an unequivocal reminder that gay marriage remains unappealing in many parts of the country, even as its support grows overall nationally.
That's a warning for President Obama, who is currently positioned somewhere between supporters of gay marriage -- who include campaign backers and members of his own administration -- and resistant voters like those who helped pass the gay marriage ban this week in the Tar Heel State.
Obama's description of himself as "evolving" on the issue amounts to a public flirtation, and has prompted speculation that he'll become a gay-marriage supporter in time for the Democratic National Convention this summer in Charlotte. But the president is counting on North Carolina and demographically similar states, like Virginia, to lift him to a second term. Assuming an unpopular position on such a high-profile issue is politically perilous in those states and others where he may need every last vote to beat back Republican foe Mitt Romney.
