If the political mood of the country (or much of it) doesn’t change markedly in the next several months, don’t be surprised if there’s an anti-Obama insurgency in the Democrat party. The Democrats my lose the White House no matter the party’s nominee for president, but a landslide loss would create an anti-Democrat bandwagon effect that lasts for years or decades.

For the history challenged among you, I point to the post-Civil War succession of Republican administrations from 1869 to 1913, broken only by the two terms of Grover Cleveland — a pro-business, gold-standard, small-government, northern Democrat. Then, there was the reaction to the Great Depression, which yielded Democrat presidencies from 1933 to 1969, broken only by the two terms of Dwight Eisenhower — a middling Republican known mainly to the public as the general in charge of the D-Day invasion and subsequent defeat of Hitler’s armies.

With those precedents in mind, there must be a goodly number of influential Democrats who are thinking about alternatives to Obama. If they are not, they should be. BO’s net popularity index has returned to the slough of despond, after having risen somewhat in the post-election “honeymoon” that followed BO’s cave-in on the extension of the Bush tax cuts:

Each plot-point represents the 7-day trend in BO’s net popularity (or lack thereof). Net popularity is measured as the percentage of likely voters who strongly approve of BO, minus the percentage of likely voters who strongly disapprove of BO. The approval and disapproval statistics are derived from Rasmussen Reports’ Daily Presidential Tracking Poll. I use Rasmussen’s polling results because Rasmussen has a good track record with respect to presidential-election polling.

Then there is Obamacare, which has never been popular, and has just receded to its lowest rating since congressional Democrats committed collective suicide by ramming it through:

Derived from this article and its predecessors at Rasmussen Reports. Poll results before passage of Obamacare represent strong approval minus strong disapproval. Poll results after passage of Obamacare represent strong approval of repeal minus strong disapproval of repeal.