单项选择题

The results of the U.S. midterm elections are that the Democrats have suffered heavy losses and the Republicans have recaptured the House of Representatives. It’s not much of a surprise--opinion polls have been predicting a humiliating defeat for President Barack Obama for many weeks.
But if you look back at Obama’s sweeping victory in 2008, it seems incredible that he could suffer such a crushing setback after less than two years in office. His approval ratings have also dropped and now hover below the 45 percent mark.
Where did it all go wrong for the President Of course, there’s the economy. Although it’s generally accepted that Obama inherited, not caused, the economic downturn, it’s widely believed that he hasn’t done enough to mitigate its effects.
The unemployment rate, which currently stands at 9.6 percent, hasn’t gone down in a year. Economic growth has also remained disappointing despite a stimulus package worth trillions of dollars.
Last week, the U. S. Federal Reserve announced that another $ 600 billion would be pumped into the ailing economy over the next eight months. This highlights the failure of the quantitative easing measures so far.
Yet according to a poll conducted by New York Times and CBS News at the end of October, nearly 70 percent of Americans believed that the economic slump was only temporary. Half of respondents said they believed the economy was where they expected it to be at this point and less than 10 percent believed the current administration was to blame for the state of the economy.
So if the financial crisis isn’t the sole cause of Obama’s slump in popularity, which other factors come into play
First, troops in Iraq and Mghanistan are still serving and dying. Second, health care reform has proved widely unpopular. Millions ale still not covered by health insurance and millions more are worried about the higher tax rates introduced to pay for the reform. Increased government involvement in health care is also resented.
Young people, who turned out in droves to help him win in 2008, appear particularly disillusioned with Obama. "It was my first time voting," a student outside a Colorado senatorial debate told the Guardian in October.
"I was campaigning for Obama and helping him get the vote out. I grew up under Bush. During my entire conscious life politics sucked. Finally something really exciting happened. But it didn’t deliver as much as I expected it to."
Despite appearances on MTV and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as well as an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Obama seemed unable to drum up enthusiasm among young voters as the election approached.
According to a Harvard University poll, last November 36 percent of those aged 18 ～ 29 said they would vote in the midterms, but by October of this year that figure had dropped to 27 percent.
However, Obama supporters can take comfort from the 1982 midterm elections that saw the Republicans, under Ronald Reagan, lose 26 House seats in the midst of a deep recession. Two years later, with the help of an economic recovery, Reagan was re-elected in a landslide.
We can infer from this passage that ______.