President Obama isn't doing so well in some of his party primaries where a surprisingly large number of Democrats are giving him the thumbs down.
The national news media are paying little attention to the Democrats' presidential primaries because Mr. Obama is assured of his nomination. But the large size of the anti-Obama vote - exposing deep unrest in his party's political base - has shaken his campaign's high command.
The latest explosions erupted Tuesday in the Kentucky and Arkansas primaries, which, of course, Mr. Obama won easily. But a stunning 42 percent of Kentucky Democrats voted for "uncommitted" on their ballots.
In yellow dog Democrat Arkansas, 42 percent voted for a little-known Tennessee lawyer, John Wolfe, over the president of the United States.
Two weeks ago in the West Virginia primary, Keith Judd, a convicted felon and now Texas prison inmate, got 41 percent of the vote.
Some smarty-pants political pundits who think they know everything say some of this is about race and that these states are firmly in the GOP column anyway.
"You will forgive me, I hope, a lack of excitement about the 'story' of the president's weakness in these two states [i.e. Arkansas and Kentucky] and in other border states with large fossil-fuel energy industries and relatively few African-Americans, since I've been reading about it since the 2008 primaries," Democratic strategist Ed Kilgore says in Wednesday's Washington Monthly Political Animal blog.
But others think the Democrats' sizable anti-Obama vote in the party primaries has much deeper implications for the election.
Such strong antipathy toward Mr. Obama at this end point in his trouble-plagued presidency is "an indicator of not-insignificant pockets of unrest within his party," The Washington Post's campaign trackers Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake write.
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