You've heard it time and time again -- mainly from Republicans: The midterm elections are a referendum on President Obama. This canard has been repeated so often, it has become more or less conventional wisdom in the Beltway media. Eleanor Clift, in Newsweek, declared, “Like it or not, the midterm election is shaping up as a referendum on President Obama.” Gloria Berger recently stated that “it looks like this election is going to be” a “referendum on Barack Obama.” Local media reports note that Republicans are following the national party's lead and are seeking to turn “local and state races into a referendum on Obama.” Fox News' Gretchen Carlson recently informed Democratic National Committee chair Tim Kaine that “the reason that we're seeing these tea party candidates win is because a lot of people believe it's a referendum on your guy -- on President Obama.” But, like so many Beltway “facts,” recent public opinion polls show that this sentiment may not actually be true.

A New York Times poll, which was conducted September 10-14, asked, “Do you think of your vote for Congress this fall as a vote for Barack Obama, a vote against Barack Obama, or don't you think of your vote this fall as being about Barack Obama?” Forty-five percent of respondents said that “Obama [is] not a factor” in their vote. And of those who said that their vote was, on some level, related to Obama, almost an equal amount said that their vote would be “for Obama” as those who said it would be “against Obama” (23 percent vs. 25 percent, respectively). A recent AP/GfK poll yielded similar results, with 48 percent saying that “President Obama [will] not be a factor in your vote for Congress.” The AP poll found that an equal percentage said their vote would be “at least in part” to “show support for President Obama” or to “show opposition to the President Obama.”

So, really, these polls indicate that people's motivations in voting in the midterms aren't really shaping up to be the rejection of Obama as the media, particularly the right-wing media, would like you to believe. Yet, the mainstream media has been largely absent in covering these poll results. After all, it doesn't fit into their favored storyline for framing these midterm elections, or really any election since Obama's taken over. Recall that the media dubiously declared Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts as a “referendum on President Obama,” and the November 2009 results of governors races in Virginia and New Jersey were a referendum on Obama and “Obamacare.”

The reality is that voters' motivations for voting in November are complicated, but seem to relate mainly to the economy. And even there, poll after poll after poll show that more voters blame former President Bush and Republicans more than Obama and Democrats for the current economic conditions. But, if you listen to the media, voters are furious with Democrats and Obama and want to prove it to them by throwing as many of them out of office as they possibly can come November. It's a shame that facts are getting in the way of their storyline.