At first glance it seems to be a Romney nightmare scenario:
Which leads to Romney’s nightmare scenario: If things don’t turn around for Romney soon, those super PACs may give up on the task of electing Romney as president and turn to the task of encircling Obama’s second term with a Republican House and a Republican Senate.
Consider the numbers they’re looking at. A week ago, Obama was leading by 3.1 percent in RealClearPolitics’ average of polls, and he had a 74.8 percent chance of winning the election in Nate Silver’s electoral model. But that was supposed to change: Obama’s convention bounce was dissipating, and the plan was for Romney, the RNC and the super PACs to flood the airwaves, creating the conditions necessary for Romney to mount a comeback.
One week later, Obama is up by 3.7 percent in the polls, and up to 77.6 percent in the model.
The truth is that if Romney’s campaign continues to tank, the result will be felt up and down the ballot, no matter what those super PACs spend. Romney loses big and the Republican lose it all.
I kind of agree that the argument for voting for Romney turns out to be mainly the argument that Obama’s second term will be a disaster, AND Romney, as a competent, sensible guy, would be a significant improvement. But it only works if Romney is actually a contender.
So THE REPUBLICAN NIGHTMARE SCENARIO is that Romney slides into irrelevance. How could that not happen if he doesn’t do well in the debates?
We cant’t deny the evidence (for example from Florida today) that Mitt’s position is a little weaker every day.
Look at this no toss-up states map. How could it be that Mitt has retreated into only McCain territory, given the president’s record and all?
September 25th, 2012 | 10:47 am
The Republican elephant is sliding in the poles, by self inflicted political gaffes. His mouth is faster than he thinks. Imagine what damage he would do as President?
September 25th, 2012 | 11:02 am
[...] a man a lot of good'San Francisco ChronicleRomney, Obama focus on US posture abroadBoston HeraldThe Republican Nightmare ScenarioFirst Things (blog)The Courier-Journalall 11,659 news [...]
September 25th, 2012 | 11:30 am
“How could it be that Mitt has retreated into only McCain territory, given the president’s record and all?”
According to the “information” most people in the country receive, the current president has a truly stellar record, and our continuing problems are just a hangover from the mistakes and crimes of the previous era of “far-right” Republican rule, which the current president and his team are making a supreme effort to overcome. Of course, most people also are given to understand that the ideas and policies advocated by the Democrats and the Left (other than their occasional accommodation of the Right) played no role in creating the problems we have.
September 25th, 2012 | 11:31 am
Hey Peter, if you really want Romney to loose, keep up the constant negative comments. One thing about the Obama crowd. No matter how bad he is, they keep supporting him. Seems the right loves to take aim at their foot and fire away.
September 25th, 2012 | 1:33 pm
Well, it could be that Obama, and his speech making cohorts have actually given specific reasons and particular things about what they want to keep doing, where Romney’s ideas are completely devoid of circumstantial detail thus giving those who might argue for them nothing to work with.
It could be that Romney himself has done nothing but support the Obama campaign narrative of Romney as filthy rich, unfeeling and indifferent to anybody but the rest of the rich, has made himself richer by making the economic decline here worse instead of doing what he can to reverse it, and has stashed all this money in secret foreign bank accounts to evade paying taxes.
Now maybe this narrative is incorrect, but I can’t see where his campaign has done anything at all to refute it.
Maybe it’s due to things like scheduling his Ohio bus tour through the major cities where Obama is strongest and the voters most fixed. Nobody seems to have told his people the reality of Ohio politics: if an election is close, the deciding votes will come from Ohio’s poor, rural, and depressed Southeast, where a large part of the infamous 47% live in this state. He needs a real political “brain” in the sense that Karl Rove was “Bush’s brain”.
It could be that the Republican Party has done everything possible to drive away Women, African-Americans, Latinos, Gays, Intellectuals, Unionized Workers, Poor People, and even Seniors (!) Their response to this
September 25th, 2012 | 1:46 pm
has been to everything they can to prevent all these people from voting (and even saying openly in some cases that this is what they are doing and why they are doing it). This, of course, makes th probable angry turnout of all the fine Americans far more likely.
Put all those groups together and, if you don’t quite have a majority now, in a decade or so you will. A majority with long memories.
Or it could be that albatross around the Republican Party’s neck, George W. Bush. After all, some of the most destructive things to happen to America since the 1930′s occurred on his watch and were largely finished by the time Obama took over. And if Obama has failed to use his magic wand to fix all this stuff completely, he’s not done anything to make it worse, and Romney has given no serious indication that can, or intends, to make it better.
That’s probably enough reasons.
September 25th, 2012 | 2:36 pm
Or you guys are over-reacting to biased polls just as Romney’s rivals wants you to:
“The Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting. So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. IVR [Interactive Voice Response] polls are heavily weighted. You can weight to whatever result you want. Some polls have included sizable segments of voters who say they are ‘not enthusiastic’ to vote or non-voters to dilute Republicans. Major pollsters have samples with Republican affiliation in the 20 to 30 percent range, at such low levels not seen since the 1960s in states like Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and which then place Obama ahead. The intended effect is to suppress Republican turnout through media polling bias. We’ll see a lot more of this.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/327982/what-john-mclaughlin-sees-polls-right-now
In other words: You’re being punk’d.
September 25th, 2012 | 2:42 pm
Similarly:
http://www.examiner.com/article/two-democratic-pollsters-confirm-major-polls-skewed-against-mitt-romney
And here’s one attempt to unskew the skew:
http://www.unskewedpolls.com/
Welcome to the world of postmodern politics.
September 25th, 2012 | 4:10 pm
Pseudo, I kind of doubt that there’s a conspiracy here involving a lot of polls. Nonetheless, I hope you’re right. But the fact remains that the turnout depends on Romney reversing the negative momentum generated by his terrible campaign. My hope is still alive, and my criticism is tough love.
September 25th, 2012 | 4:49 pm
I think its healthy to be skeptical about these things as well. But I would temper that skepticism with atleast two observations.
1. Clearly the mainstream media is off the rails in terms of its professional standards of objectivity. So if mainstream media is so skewed, why should we think the pollsters are any more insulated from the same biases?
2. Apparently it is common knowledge that the bulk of these polls are using 2008 turn-out models. Is there any objective argument one could make in favor of using 2008 as the basis of 2012?
I would not suggest a conspiracy is occurring, just epic group think among the professional media and its associated organizations. I don’t see a reason to think pollsters are somehow immune to the condition.
September 25th, 2012 | 5:03 pm
[...] Tyler Cowen Will Wilkinson Wunderkammer Amazon.com Widgets « Previous |Home| John McRomney, Or [...]
September 25th, 2012 | 7:00 pm
[...] The Republican Nightmare ScenarioFirst Things (blog)Which leads to Romney's nightmare scenario: If things don't turn around for Romney soon, those super PACs may give up on the task of electing Romney as president and turn to the task of encircling Obama's second term with a Republican House and a …Obama-Brown Bipartisan Ties Touted in Romney Aide's AdsBusinessweekElection roundup: Romney changes focus, Cicilline pulls aheadThe Brown Daily Heraldall 41 news articles » [...]
September 25th, 2012 | 7:00 pm
[...] 18, 2012. AFP PHOTO/Nicholas KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/GettyImages) …The Republican Nightmare ScenarioFirst Things (blog)Romney says Clinton can 'do a man a lot of good'San Francisco [...]
September 25th, 2012 | 7:01 pm
[...] spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York …The Republican brain drainWashington PostThe Republican Nightmare ScenarioFirst Things (blog)Romney says Clinton can 'do a man a lot of good'San Francisco [...]
September 25th, 2012 | 9:57 pm
Honestly, at this point the people who don’t think the polls are rigged are the slow ones. Using 2008 turnout models for the 2010 mid-terms might have been acceptable, using at the largest mid-term defeat for the ruling party since the Great Depression is silly. None of the woe-is-me-cons ever address this. Probably, because working in the media it’s best to leave that stone unturned.
September 25th, 2012 | 10:19 pm
A good deal of this foolishness about polls comes from not knowing which are really relevant. From about now on the key polls are in the states, not any of the national trackers. Moreover, a poll from Texas or New York is really not going to tell you that much. I wouldn’t presume to call an Obama victory in Texas, and I assume old Pseudoplotinus is unlikely to call a Romney victory in New York, no matter how skewed we think the polls may be. The difference is made not in these states, but the 5-6 states where the lead is between 1-5%. Anybody here look at them lately? If not, you have your nose pointing in the wrong direction.
Arguments of the form: Because the media is biased the polls must be biased, too, are simply silly. Without the facts of which polls where and by whom, as well as their sampling assumptions all criticisms of polls are just hot air–wish fulfillment and special pleading because you don’t like the flavor of the result.
Numbers are powerful things, even if we barely made it through doing sums. You may not win by betting Don’t Pass at the Craps table, splitting a pair of tens in Blackjack, or betting only after 3 consecutive wins by the Player in Mini-Baccarat, but you sure will lose a lot slower.
September 26th, 2012 | 10:23 am
I hate to add to this but we do know that this administration has been very tough on journalists for access to them- going so far as to require “quote approval” for all journalist who get access to the Executive Branch. So it is not hard to imagine pressure placed on pollsters or the media when using polls by politicians (which is not so unusual) in a similar way the administration tries to control the free speech of journalists who surround it. And it’s not hard to imagine that those journalists, already put upon, are told to use the polls in a certain way to make them look better.
After all, most people don’t bother looking into what polls actually say but what NBC, the NYT, CBS and Fox SAY those polls say. It is very easy to manipulate a poll of 500 possible voters into saying something big about, say, Ohio voters.
So I don’t think it’s that far out there to imagine some favorable nudging in the President’s direction.
September 26th, 2012 | 1:19 pm
Keep your eyes on Rasmussen. Its the only poll that’s close to objective. Its tied. Agreed it shouldn’t be even that close given the president’s record. But that just shows you the degredation of the country.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact