It is still close enough that Romney could win. The Romney team hasn’t given up yet. We’ll know when the Romney team has given up. It will be when anonymous Romney staffers start leaking to liberal-leaning news outlets that Romney is losing because of the Tea Party/Paul Ryan/social conservatives.
Friday, September 28, 2012, 5:44 PM
September 28th, 2012 | 7:08 pm
Oh, I don’t think they have given up, or will give up. I just think that after running for president for something like 6 years, and faced with an opponent who is so manifestly incompetent that making the case against him should be trivial, the fact that their campaign is so pitiful indicates they just haven’t got a clue about what to do.
September 28th, 2012 | 8:20 pm
Brian, I do think they are confused. This is the first time this year that they are running against a campaign that is well funded and well organized with a disciplined candidate. He didn’t face anything like that in the primaries. Though the media environment makes it worse of course.
September 29th, 2012 | 2:48 am
I think that there is a lot of overreacting going on. The article below points out some of the gaffes that Reagan made on the campaign trail in 1980 as well as the panic that some Republicans had during that time frame.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/328582/election-1980-style-victor-davis-hanson
I am not saying that this is 1980 all over again, just that campaign gaffes, polling snapshots and anonymous comments by “well-connected Republicans” aren’t indicative of final results. I think the race is really tight (Obama likely has a slight lead) but nothing is close to being decided. The debates matter, turnout matters and while I am generally “meh” about Romney as a candidate and a campaigner, I think Obama is overrated. Even with Media cover, he still is vulnerable. He is just as likely to make a mistake during the debates as Romney is.
September 29th, 2012 | 4:26 am
If Obama makes a mistake the the Left will find ways to excuse it. That means most of the media will find ways to excuse him for the mistake because most of the media is of the Left. If Romney makes a mistake he will not get the same kind of grace, not even from most on the Right.
September 29th, 2012 | 6:30 am
Looking at the matter as objectively as I can (which is probably not very objectively) I would say that Romney’s chances boil down to where rather than what. Everybody agrees that he has about 190 to 200 electoral votes locked up in The Great Red Swath from South Carolina to Montana. That means that he has to gain somewhere between 70-80 electoral votes over that. Ohio has 18 of them, Florida has 29 of them. Romney has to win both and even that only gives him an extra 47. So, 30 more to go. There’s several different combinations from there, but it is still confined to about 5 more states.
What I conclude from this is that at little over a month to go National Tracking Polls (Gallup, Rasmussen and so on) are far less important than state polls in the critical states, if you want to evaluate his chances.
Further, these days it’s less effective to think in terms of weeks than news cycles of about 3-5 days, and we have five of them. I’d say that you can track how much progress Romney has made by thinking hard about where he stands every Thursday. He has to have made an impact by that point in each week to see any progress. The debates are artificial “events” that give either candidate a real shot at moving the totals.
Other than that, it’s up to the Wheel Of Fortune.
September 29th, 2012 | 9:02 am
I really don’t understand this defeatist talk that now dominates PoMoCon.
Don’t you remember 2010 and how the Tea Party captured the House and creamed the commie-Dems? What’s changed? The hated Obama is still in the White House and the commie-Dems are still doing their best to kill jobs, deny Catholics/Christians freedom of religion, and destroy the American economy.
The Tea Party hasn’t gone away and if anything, they’re still mad as hell.
Romney in a landslide, though he and his people may not be able to figure out why and sure won’t be grateful to the grassroots.
BTW, I just watched “Greater Glory”, an outstanding movie re: an event I was not aware of, that makes you understand what it is Obama and the Democrats are really capable of. I have to admit I got a little choked on this one, rememgbering what the Sisters of Notre Dame taught me over fifty years ago about never denying the Christ, no matter the price. Viva la Christos!
September 29th, 2012 | 11:33 am
I’m confused too. How can it possibly be this close with a president this bad? These “campaign-analysis” and “media-environment” explanations only take my stunned little brain so far in understanding what’s happening.
September 29th, 2012 | 11:37 am
He has gone from:
1) REPEAL OBAMACARE!
to
2) There are some things we want to keep
to
3) SOME PARTS are good, we want to replace the rest
to
4) I am proud of the government takeover of healthcare in MASS and I would like to see that for all americans
Anyone still voting republican is a stooge.
September 29th, 2012 | 5:26 pm
Carl, the fraction of the population that has no connection to the Republican Party and has a hostile view of the party is rising. Some of these folks could be won over eventually, but even if Romney was running a good conventional campaign he wouldn’t be getting them this year. Even a good campaign with a better candidate probably isn’t more than a few points ahead of Obama at this point. Not being able to communicate to rising demographic cohorts will do that to you.
There are also some persuadables who have heard the message that the bad stuff started under Bush and Obama did the best he could under the situation. This isn’t a slam dunk argument, but it has some plausibility. A good argument from Romney could win this thing. But all they are hearing from Romney is gibberish. That is partly because Romney really is talking nonsense that is disconnected from people’s lives. That is partly because even some of that is lost in the media filter. Some fraction of the otherwise persuadable public thinks that Romney is going to raise their taxes. And Romney spent his biggest speech talking about roses and mommy and daddy, and now he is out there rapping America The Beautiful. He is getting what he deserves.
September 30th, 2012 | 11:07 pm
Pete, we’ve run the merry-go-round back to two things: Romney could refute this or that argument of Obama’s and the media have left-liberal bias.
Even if Romney did refute Obama’s argument about the economy, about Medicare or about anything else, that is only half of what he would need, and for that matter, only half of what the Republican Party has needed since 2008. The voters want to know one basic thing, What are you going to do to get us out of this mess?
It may be that the arguments made by and for Obama can be refuted, and they certainly can be vigorously attacked. But even refuting them does not answer the voter’s question in the least. What is Mitt Romney and the Republican Party going to do to get us out of this mess?
It’s not just Romney’s problem. That same question was being asked in 2008. The McCain campaign came nowhere near to a satisfactory answer. It’s still being asked, and not only has Romney failed to answer it, not a single prominent speaker at the Republican convention addressed it either.
You should take a closer look at the actual message of the Obama campaign during and since the DNC. The voters have the same question for Obama and the Democrats, with an added corollary, What have you done to straighten out this mess?
The Obama campaign have given real answers to these questions. They might be inadequate answers, they might be wrong answers, they might be flat out lies. But they are something, not nothing.
The consistent form of the Obama message is: We have done XYZ, we will do ABC, and it will take ABC and four more years to straighten stuff out. Whether you believe the message or not, it is clearly an answer to the questions being asked.
There is no consistent form whatever to the Republican message, and I mean the Republican message and not just Romney’s message. And there is nothing even remotely resembling an answer to the question.
I, personally, think that this points back toward folks such as yourselves, Conservative intellectuals. Conservatives have high moral principles, conservatives have permanent values, conservatives have historical precedents, and conservatives have sophisticated social and economic philosophies. But they have nothing with which to apply these to contemporary facts and answer straightforward, non-conservative, questions.
I once saw Bill O’reilly give the classic answer to this and dismiss such things as “liberal facts”. Sigh.
We can leave the issue of whether Conservatism has different facts than Liberalism for Bill to moot. In any case the voters have very specific facts landing in their lap to be dealt with and they want to know what you have to offer to help them.
Well, conservatives have high moral principles, lasting values, historical precedents, and sophisticated economic and social philosophies. You can read all these being talked over and mulled over constantly in the conservative media.
As to the mainstream media and its biases, conservatives think that it is enough to simply point out the biases either bitterly or combatively.
Unfortunately, they are the media we have: you have them, I have them, we all have them together; and if we want to say something and get it heard, we have to put on our thinking caps about how to do it through the media that are already there, and not through the ones that would be there if good principles and right thinking ruled the world.
This means that we have to start looking at what else is in the media, as well as what covert political stances are there. I think I can point out at least one thing that the Romney campaign might have used effectively: the mainstream media have been tying themselves into pretzels insisting that this is a “close race” and there is still “long time ahead in which things might change.”
This might be so, but it is clearly not why the mainstream media are doing it: if the horse race isn’t “neck and neck”, there’s not much real news to cover and not much real reason to follow the coverage. Picking up and putting on the thinking cap should easily suggest how Republicans might have turned this to their advantage.
October 1st, 2012 | 9:21 am
Pete- What do you make of the decreased numbers of Democrats registered to vote in some of the big swing states? Jim Geraghty has pointed this out over at NRO: http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/328401/democrats-advantage-voter-registration-slipping-key-states
Joseph Marshall- Yes, much of what is talked about here at PoMoCon is “high moral principles, lasting values, historical precedents, and sophisticated economic and social philosophies” because it’s a blog of political philosophy and not a public policy blog. On the other hand, I have seen a few discussions here of conservative policy that went pretty deep. Most of that discussion has focused on Paul Ryan’s policy proposals, which absolutely do address the “specific facts” voters are concerned with.
You are correct to say that Republicans have fallen back on platitudes far too often than they have said much about what they would do and how that would affect people’s lives, but Pete and Peter have made that criticism a theme of this blog over the past few months. I do hope that Romney takes his chance to speak directly to the people during the debates to make it clear that his policies are a viable alternative. Otherwise, the media will continue to define him as a stock politician.
October 1st, 2012 | 6:49 pm
Joseph, “The voters want to know one basic thing, What are you going to do to get us out of this mess?”
Talking about “this mess” is a bit confusing, but if we were talking about improving the rate of economic growth and increasing the take home pay of large numbers of voters, you might want to include Robert Stein’s tax reform that would make the tax code both more progressive and more pro-investment (in several senses of the term.) You could look at federal laws making Indiana-style HSA/catastrophic coverage plans legal everywhere which seem to have increased take home pay, reduced medical expenses, increased, and maintained health care security. You could also help explain that, in light of our deficits, tax increased focused fiscal consolidations do a lot more to reduce economic growth than spending cut-focused fiscal consolidations. And we’ve already talked about one Republican’s idea to bring down college costs.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704231304575091600470293066.html
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/alesina/files/Output%2BEffect%2BFiscal%2BConsolidations_Aug%2B2012.pdf
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/taxes-and-the-family
Now it isn’t that simple. Any policy change is going to produce winners and losers. So it will take explaining and coalition building to have a real chance of turning any policy changes into a winning political position. It is much easier to do what Romney did and say in effect “My dad loved my mom, and so you should vote for me because I think you’re a moron.”
October 1st, 2012 | 6:53 pm
Corey, that looks like a data point in favor of hope for Romney – especially since some of those states were fairly close in 2008.
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