Gallup polls show Obama winning among voters in the East, West, and Midwest. It's the south that has Romney ahead. At The National Memo, Gene Lyons looks at Why Do So Many Republicans Really Hate Obama?, and finds that the answer lies in the South and its peculiar institutions of "conspiratorial threats and eschatological panics":
Or, to put it another way, if President Obama can win in this economy, how could any talented Democratic candidate lose?The temptation for Southern Republicans would be to double down on the crazy, because “conservatism,” so-called, can never fail, only be failed. Also because religious melodrama is really what an awful lot of them are really about. That, and Koch Brothers money. They’re not actually conservatives at all, in the classical sense, but sentimental fanatics seeking to purge the nation of sin; adepts of “limited government” with their noses buried in women’s panty drawers; apostles of a lost Utopia located in a non-existent past, most often in 60s sitcoms like “The Andy Griffith Show.”
In that sense, fear and loathing of President Obama strikes me as a lot wider than deep; a fad, not an existential dread. They survived the Voting Rights Act; they’ll get over this. However, adapting to the new political reality may take some time.