That breaks down a little differently when talking about race and political party affiliation.

About 47 percent of Democrats said America is going the wrong way, compared with 83 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of voters not affiliated with either major political party. Being Republican is claimed by 31.1 percent of Americans, while 34.3 percent consider themselves Democrats.

Among black voters, 63 percent believe the country is moving in the right direction, compared with 71 percent of white voters and 72 percent of all other voters.

Among “mainstream voters,” 80 percent think the country is going the wrong way; while 64 percent of “political class voters” (politicians, policy advisors, and those very aware of politics) believe the U.S. is heading in the right direction.

The poll, conducted by national telephone survey the week ending Feb. 27, demonstrated a 1-point rise in voter confidence compared with the previous week. However, 39 percent of those surveyed said they “strongly disapprove” of the president’s performance, a point higher than the previous month. According to Rasmussen, the president’s disapproval rating has wavered between 37 and 44 percent since July 2009.

What the polls numbers pointed to:

• Most voters (53 percent) want to see the national health care law repealed and are confident that repeal will happen. However, belief that repeal will be good for the economy has fallen to its lowest level ever, to 38 percent.
• Most voters (58 percent) prefer a partial federal government shutdown over maintaining current spending levels.
• Most voters(58 percent) fear political unrest in the Middle East might lead the U.S. into participating in another war.
• Most voters (58 percent) want to end foreign aid to all Arab nations in the Middle East (Egypt is the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid). A little over 50 percent favor continuing foreign aid to Israel.
• Most Americans (61 percent) say it is unlikely that all U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by the end of the year, as planned.
• About 36 percent of voters rate the president’s handling of national security issues as “poor”; 40 percent give him good marks.

About 42 percent of all likely voters give Congress a poor grade: 37 percent of GOP voters said Congress is doing poorly, which is down from 55 percent a month ago. Only 13 percent of Democrats and 11 percent of independent voters rate Congress as good or excellent.

Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) (Brooks Smothers/ZUMA Press)

Two things distinguished Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Joe Sestak in their campaign for the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nomination. The first is Specter’s decades of protean Capitol Hill experience, which Sestak effectively turned into a liability. The second is Specter’s opposition to President Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan war — the only issue in the primary in which Specter could plausibly claim to be on Sestak’s left. In the end, the characterological issue mattered and the war issue didn’t.

[Security1]It wasn’t that voters actively decided that Sestak’s position on the war resonated. It was that the war was decidedly an afterthought in the race. “It has not been an issue, even though they differ on it,” said Terry Madonna, the director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Pennsylvania’s Franklin & Mary College.

That was perhaps the only substantive issue that actually separated the two candidates. “They divide evenly among liberal and moderate voters,” Madonna observed shortly before the balloting. Among the relevant demographics for the race — union members, urban and suburban residents — the even match persisted. But what struck a chord for Madonna is that despite Sestak’s “reasonably liberal” voting record, he said “MoveOn and the liberals have not been in the state working hard for him.”

MoveOn’s endorsement was the result of the groups’ Pennsylvania membership strongly preferring the more-progressive Sestak, said Ilyse Hogue, the group’s director of political advocacy and communications. “We acknowledge that we had different positions on the Afghanistan surge, but MoveOn members are typically pragmatic progressives. There’s no purity test,” Hogue said in an instant message. “Our members felt that the Congressman would represent them better and would be more willing to shake up the establishment culture.”

“She wasn’t out there!” said an annoyed Laura White, a 78-year-old pilates instructor who supported Coakley in the Democratic primary. “That’s not how the Kennedys ran. I remember seeing JFK campaign in New York in 1960, shaking hands in the rain, not even wearing a raincoat!” She never considered voting for Brown — he reminded her of George W. Bush — but she was disappointed in Coakley.

Lyn Ackerly, who’d backed Coakley’s rival Alan Khazei in the primary (“it was his honesty”), wasn’t entirely happy about her vote. “We need the health care bill to pass,” she said, “but it’s been whittled down so much.” On Coakley’s campaign: “If she loses, it was her fault.”

George Watkins, a prep cook who hadn’t voted in the primary, came out because he was worried about President Obama’s agenda getting blocked if he lost “his help” in the Senate. He, too, was frustrated with Coakley, and decided to vote after polls showed the race closing.

When TWI visited the polling place, there was steady traffic but no line. Turnout was around 25 percent at lunchtime.

“There’s a trove of research that documents that color and dialect matter in important ways,” said Vesla Weaver, a professor at the University of Virginia who co-authored a 2007 study on this. “I think this may be a case where his weird use of ‘negro’ marred the other aspects of his statement.”

“The Skin Color Paradox and the American Racial Order,” which first appeared in Social Forces, is below the jump. Politically, this isn’t something any politician can talk about and expect to skirt controversy. But it’s not too radical in the political science discipline.

Skin Color Paradox Final Article

For the first time since 1964, Virginia is in play in a presidential election. Many residents are surprised to see Virginia shaded blue on some electoral maps. The state will indeed make history if it favors Sen. Barack Obama. But in my mind, Virginia is already making history.

Polls show Obama leading, on average, by about 4.4 percent. This is monumental because the first African-American presidential candidate might take the state and because, more important, he’s so close to actually pulling it off.

Slavery, segregation and racial hatred clouds Virginia’s past. In some parts of the state, racial hatred is still alive — a reality we’ve been forced to face this election season. But another reality has also surfaced: Virginians have looked beyond skin color to learn about the candidates and what they stand for. In doing so, they’ve become so energized about the issues that they are turning out in record numbers to vote.

White that’s exciting, it’s also worrisome. High turnout and wet weather have caused problems at polling places throughout the state.

Twenty-five percent of Virginia’s polling places use optical scanning machines. There are reports that some are acting up because paper ballots were wet and the machines couldn’t read them. There have been voting-machine malfunctions in Louisa, Petersburg and Chesterfield counties, as well as elsewhere. In Richmond and Virginia Beach, precincts opened late. Long lines in Richmond and its suburbs have reportedly created some voting problems.

Hopefully, most of these problems will get sorted out, and all registered Virginians who haven’t already voted will make it to the polls by 7 p.m. Any voters encountering problems can report them to the CNN Voter Hotline at 1-877-462-6608.

No matter the outcome, this election is groundbreaking for Virginia. My state may still have a long way to go — but it’s on the right track.

The judge also revealed that he had voted early on Friday and had to stand in line for more than two hours. “It was quite a civics lesson,” Williams said.

The Advancement Project, which joined in the lawsuit with the NAACP, issued a statement saying, “With 500,000 new voters and high expected turnout the burden shouldn’t be on voters, it should be on the Commonwealth to make sure voting is accessible.”

An Oakland, Calif. rally, part of the National Day of Action (Flickr: greenforall.org)

It’s becoming apparent that the youth vote could be a key component of Tuesday’s electorate. Americans age 18 to 30 are expected to turn out in record numbers. This is what the Obama campaign has long been focusing on, since Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, does well with voters under 30, according to national polls.

If young voters meet these expectations and turn out to vote, their preferences could influence the electorate. That’s why political organizers and pollsters have been trying to determine exactly what those preferences are.

Illustration by:Matt Mahurin

Like other demographic groups, voters under age 30 are most concerned about the economy. Since, according to the polls, the majority of all voters view Obama as better able to handle economic issues than his opponent, Sen. John McCain, this could be one reason the Illinois senator attracts the youth vote.

But young voters are concerned about more than the economy. While their concerns frequently match those of other demographics, there’s at least one issue where they diverge: the environment.

The environment is the major exception for youth voters, according to Carroll Doherty, the associate director at the Pew Research Center. In an October poll, 64 percent of voters under age 30 said the environment is “very important,” compared to 55 percent of older voters.

“At a time when there is so much convergence in priorities,” Doherty said, “that is a noticeable, significant difference.”

He attributes the difference to greater environmental consciousness among young people. For example, young people are more concerned about human effects on global warming than any other age group, according to an April Pew poll.

What’s most noteworthy about this interest in the environment is that it crosses party lines.

Young Republicans and conservatives, for example, see a need for more investment in clean energy, said Ashley Barbera, communications director for College Republicans. “A lot of [them] support alternative energy but have different reasons for that support — whether it’s climate change or [cutting the] cost of energy or [reducing] dependence on foreign oil.” For more and more young people, she says, “climate change is something that needs to be addressed.”

In this way, young conservative voters diverge from older conservatives, since the GOP base has not called for action on climate change, according to groups like the Heritage Foundation.

Nonpartisan political organizers are also finding that young voters are bipartisan when it comes to the environment. Generation Vote, a coalition of 20 youth organizations working to get out the vote, declared climate change the No. 5 issue on its “Youth Agenda,” which ranks the nine issues most important to young voters.

Stephanie Young, Rock the Vote communications associate, also said that young people across the political spectrum want to see more done to control climate change using clean-energy technologies. “Among young people,” she said, “Democrats, Republicans and independents can agree that the environment is extremely important, and that climate change is a problem.”

That’s because, Young contends, younger generations “have always been at the cutting edge of what’s going on in environmental protection.” They have grown up knowing how important it is to recycle, conserve energy and conserve water. “We have a much different perspective than other generations,” she said.

Young people may also be interested in the environment because they tend to see environmental and economic interests as compatible, some organizers conjecture. That may explain why the creation of more green jobs has emerged as an important issue for them. During the National Day of Action for Green Jobs, in September, youth turnout at events across the country was impressive.

This video of the National Day of Action, produced by Rock the Vote and Wiretap Magazine, captures a number of young environmental activists working to bring green jobs to people of all economic backgrounds:

Jessy Tolkan, executive director of the Energy Action Coalition, an umbrella youth environmental group, is working to mobilize 1 million young Americans to vote on climate and energy issues Tuesday through its Power Vote campaign.

“This generation,” Tolkan said. “sees the economy and energy and the environment as 100 percent linked.” But this isn’t new, she adds, because young people have been at the forefront of the movement advocating more green jobs and greater clean-energy investment for at least two years.

Climate change has become a determinant in some young people’s vote. “What I hear time and time again from young voters, ” said Tolkan, “is that the defining issue of our time is going to be whether or not this generation in this country stood up and dealt with climate change and energy solutions — or whether we ignored the writing on the wall and allowed this catastrophe to happen.”

Tolkan also finds that young voters, whether Republican, Democratic or independent, are largely disappointed with the environmental rhetoric they’ve heard from both presidential candidates. “What I’ve heard from [them],” said Tolkan, “is that neither candidate has gone far enough to lay out how he is going to address [these issues].”

In any discussion of young voters, it can’t be ignored that national polls show Obama leading overwhelmingly with those under 30. Pew, for example, puts the Democratic nominee ahead, 68 percent to 24 percent.

Alexandra Acker, executive director for Young Democrats for America, says this is because of Obama’s stand on three of the most important issues to young people: the economy, the war in Iraq and the environment/energy. Young voters see those issues as connected, she says.

“Young people were the first group to turn away from the war — to see the war in Iraq as a war of energy,” she said. “Young people want a commonsense approach to breaking our dependence on oil. They want to invest in clean energy and new technologies. They want to find new energy but reduce our carbon footprint.”

Acker says more young people trust Obama’s platform than Sen. McCain’s. “Just because John McCain says he’s an environmentalist, doesn’t make it so,” she said. “He has low ratings from the environmental groups [because of his voting record on conservation].”

With young people expected to vote in record numbers, this portion of the electorate could wield great power. Acker says young voters may well make issue-based decisions on Tuesday, regardless of what others might expect.

“Contrary to every stereotype, young people are taking this election very seriously,” Acker continued. “They’re voting on the issues, not on personality. More than any other age group, they’re worried about our economy. We’re the ones who are going to inherit [economic problems]. We’re the ones who will inherit environmental problems.”

The latest item on Sen. Barack Obama’s official YouTube channel is a wacky, dorky, irreverent video titled, really, “Robots Attack!”

Wonder why they didn’t use this in the prime-time infomercial…

PRODUCTION NOTES: This offbeat video is for voters who feel like they’ve seen everything, because there are no campaign ads like this. A light-hearted mash-up of old movies and a brooding musical score set the tone for an appeal for supporters to volunteer and “contact voters now!”

According to local media in counties in each of these states — in Columbus, Ohio, Marion County, Ind., and Volusia County, Fla. — GOP operatives say they haven’t ruled out challenging people whose homes are being foreclosed on in the current financial crisis, claiming that they’re no longer residents of the district where they’re voting.

In fact, as members of ACORN explained on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, many homeowners going through foreclosure proceedings still live in their homes, while they try to negotiate an arrangement with the bank that holds their mortgage.

Though Republican officials in Michigan earlier this week signed an agreement with the Obama campaign saying they would not use foreclosure lists to challenge voters in that state, the National Republican Committee has not made the same promise regarding challenges in other states.

On to Florida (flickr)

The town-hall style presidential debate is over, the swords — for the moment — withdrawn.

For most of the evening at Belmont University in Nashville, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain attacked each other over domestic spending, foreign affairs and the best way to emerge from the cloak of economic darkness. They exchanged awkward, forced pleasantries with each other and the wives and said good night and good luck to Tom Brokaw, the debate moderator. Now it was time for both men to look elsewhere — particularly south to Florida and the 130-mile ribbon of highway known as Interstate 4.

Yes, the debate was important. But it was mere Tennessee shadow boxing, a preview of what’s to happen on the battleground known as Florida’s I-4 corridor. This is where the real fight will take place.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

That’s because the I-4 corridor may be the most important political real estate in the nation. Running through Tampa, Lakeland, Daytona Beach and Orlando, the corridor holds the key to the biggest chunk of independent voters in the biggest of all battleground states. These voters’ anxieties, fears and financial troubles have suddenly pushed the junior senator from Illinois ahead of his Republican rival in the polls here — by anywhere between five and seven percentage points. For now.

Rest assured that McCain will be in Florida soon enough. Because he, like Obama, knows I-4 is the road a candidate must travel to become president of the United States.

“It is the battleground,” the Orlando-based Democratic strategist Jim Kitchens said of the corridor. “It is ground zero.”

Much of the country has an outdated view of Florida and where its power lies. For so many, Florida means Miami, which Joan Didion once aptly described as “not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility would be accommodated.” It’s a view so persuasive that when Tina Fey, playing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in her latest “Saturday Night Live” skit, pandered to Florida, she said, “From a very young age, my two greatest loves were always Jews and Cuban food.”

The truth is that Florida is a far more complicated state, where constituencies and their concerns are evolving and morphing. It is a boom state gone bust. Beneath its white-hot sky, our national angst seems magnified, because here is where everything was supposed to be sunshine, supposed to go right.

But it all seems askew. Annually beset by hurricanes, home insurance rates have rocketed. The real estate crash that bruised so much of the country pummeled Florida, taking away thousands of jobs. The high price of gasoline helped kill thousands of pilgrimages of the young and old to the state’s vacation meccas– from DisneyWorld to Boca. Stories of people leaving — repeat leaving — the state have begun to pop up in local newspapers. The elderly have become anxious about what assets they will have in their golden years.

“We are really hurting down here,” said Richard Scher, a professor of political science at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “I’ve lived here a long time — 30 years — and I’ve never seen this state so anxious, so apprehensive, and it’s all economically based. The perception is that Mr. Obama has spoken more directly to these concerns than Mr. McCain has at this point.”

Flickr: Sylvar

When asked how things were going in the state, the Florida pollster Jim Kane — whose most recent study had Obama leading McCain by seven percentage points — said, “Badly.”

“Because it was a boom state,” Kane said, “we were at the peak of the housing bubble and [when it popped] that really devastated Florida. The other day, I talked to a realtor who hasn’t sold a house in two years — and that’s not atypical. Before, she was selling three houses a week. We had a four-to-five-year run during which you couldn’t not make money buying something in real estate.”

It’s been conventional wisdom that to know Florida, you must start with two groups: the elderly and Miami’s Cuban population. Both have been misunderstood. As Susan MacManus, a professor of political science at the University of South Florida in Tampa, explained, among registered independent voters, those older than 65 make up 23.6 percent of the voting pool.

And those 35 and under? 25.3 percent.

That statistic debunks the notion that the state is controlled by retirees.

So Florida is a study in true electoral power — in how a candidate can appeal best to two different demographic groups with seemingly little in common.

Moreover, many outside observers continue to overestimate the influence of the Cuban population. The fact is that Cubans represent four percent to six percent of Florida’s voting population. They are no longer even the largest Latino group in the state. While many older Cuban-Americans still reliably vote Republican, the Puerto Ricans who live along the I-4 corridor, and vote Democratic, have all but neutralized the perceived Cuban influence in the state.

Even among the Cubans in Miami, old Cold War sentiments and hatred of all things Democratic — because of JFK’s actions, or inaction, at the Bay of Pigs — have finally begun to fall away into history.

“They still play an important role, but their role is changing,” said Wayne Smith, who served as executive secretary of President Kennedy’s Latin American Task Force and as chief of mission in the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. He is now director of the Center for International Policy’s Cuba Program.

“Partially, it’s generational,” he said. “The hard hard-liners are the ones who have been here the longest, and they’ll always vote Republican.

“But then you have the younger generation, born in the United States, and those who came in the 1980s, who just aren’t like that. I think Obama has a good chance of winning Florida, in part, because of this.”

Indeed, the city Cubans have culturally loomed over doesn’t loom over the rest of the state. As far as media markets are concerned, Miami ranks third behind Tampa and Orlando — two cornerstones of the I-4 corridor. These are cities that, in Florida’s business-friendly environment, have been able to attract people from other parts of the country who have no ties to the old political allegiances that once defined Florida. They tend to be younger, college educated and more likely to consider themselves independents.

“Who wins the middle,” said David Beattie, a veteran Florida Democratic strategist, “is the one who wins the state.”

How a presidential candidate could do this appears more obvious with each passing day. If there is one issue that cuts across Florida, it is the economic reckoning of the past two weeks. The young professionals who fostered growth along the I-4 corridor find themselves beset with angst over their prosperity and the future of their children. The elderly wonder if their investments and savings can keep them afloat in retirement. The thousands of college students who the Obama campaign has targeted, at places like the University of Florida and Florida State, are gripped with fears about a life after college with no prospects for work.

There’s no question who has and hasn’t benefited from such angst. While McCain bumbled his way in the early days of the crisis, Obama emerged as the man of reason, the level-headed man of intellect when intellect, not folksiness, was needed.

Of course Obama’s been helped by the fact that Florida is controlled by a Republican legislature and governor, and the state population now takes a dim view — surprise — of President George W. Bush. Nor, says Scher, have the personal attacks leveled against Obama, particularly by Palin in recent days, reached the right target.

“Having watched politics here for more than three decades, I can say the independents like their politics fairly bland,” Scher said. “One could say the politics of the state is pretty bland. We don’t usually choose ideological candidates. I have never seen Floridians who look approvingly at gutter politics. That doesn’t play well in this state. I don’t know who’s advising McCain, but I think he’s got the culture of the state all wrong.”

The Obama campaign, meanwhile, seems to have captured it just right. If Florida, in its geographic size and racial diversity, can be seen as a microcosm of the country, then you can truthfully say the campaign has run a mini-version of their national plan.

As it has done in nearly every state, the Obama campaign has, in Beattie’s words, run a “spread offense,” flooding the state with field offices and paid staffers. Further, they’ve done well with voter registration in sich African-American strongholds as Jacksonville. An aggressive voter-registration drive yielded 415,580 new voters as of the beginning of last month, double the number the Republicans signed up. Outreach efforts have even been made in the staunchly Republican panhandle, the one part of the state culturally tied to the South.

“What the goal has been is to cut margins in places like that,” said Kitchens. “If you only get beat 54 to 46, as opposed to 60 to 40, that’s a huge difference.”

But this is not a state McCain can afford to concede — unlike Michigan. It has the fourth largest number of electoral votes, behind solidly blue California and New York, and the burning-red Texas. When McCain effectively abandoned Michigan last week, some reports cited the move as a response to Obama’s surge in Florida.

“The path to winning the presidency for any Republican is not a path that includes losing Florida,” Beattie said. “It is a must win for McCain.”

Yet the old soldier has reason for hope. Because there’s no question the race in Florida will remain close. Florida is not a state you can break open. Not when it has roughly 20 military bases and a large number of veterans who believe in everything McCain stands for. Not when it has a sizable evangelical base now energized by Palin.

“It’ll still be the battleground people predicted it to be,” said MacManus of the University of South Florida. “The lead has changed so many times I think you predict at your own peril.”

Starting today, Obama and McCain again go their separate ways. But one can expect that both nominees must, at some point, travel that same Southern terrain — shuttling among Orlando and Tampa and Lakeland, seeking to convince those struggling in the the fading prosperity of the I-4 corridor that he is the one who can best help their plight. That he has the answers.

By Nov. 4, it may be a well-traveled corridor whose constituents could have tired of the attention. But their ultimate choice might very well decide who takes the White House.