Over at the Monkey Cage, John Sides looks at the evidence to assess whether Obama has been hurt by Wright and Bittergate and all the rest of it. The answer? Not really. At least not insofar as the polls show. Pennsylvania, which is where all of this stuff came out, actually saw Obama improve his performance -- and do in all the relevant subgroups -- relative to Ohio. Now, you can make the argument that without Wright and the bitter comments, he would have done even better, but then we're getting into impossible to prove or disprove hypotheticals. My hunch, rather, is that before these scandals, Obama was losing places like Ohio, and folks thought that was kind of weird, and demonstrated his inexplicable problems appealing to the white working class. After the scandals, Obama was losing in places like Ohio (Pennsylvania), but now there was a media narrative for why he was losing that centered around Wright and Bittergate and all the rest of it. But the fundamentals of the situation, actually, were unchanged: He has trouble in the same demographics he always had trouble with, and by essentially the same margins. It's hard to identify any actual impact that Wright had, unless you want to argue that Obama would otherwise have erased his preexisting disadvantages.
