I think it’s a pretty safe bet.
Little Nemo @12: Ford never beat NOBODY.
I still remember the National Lampoon headline from 1974: “Ford Wins Presidency with Smallest Majority Ever: Carries No States, Earns No Votes.”
I’ve read in several different places that the Romney campaign in 2012 believed the old Republican canard about the polls being wrong, and that support for Romney was greater than it actually was. They apparently went so far as to design a transition website due to the belief that they had a good shot at winning.
Which is also how he won the Vice Presidency
There were definitely people inside the Romney campaign that lived in a bubble of unskew the polls and still thought there would be a Bradley effect resulting in a Romney win.
Having a transition website probably took a few hours at most from some tech savvy interns. Nothing wrong with that. Romney winning would have been a surprise but not a Trump like shock.
Wouldn’t he have needed at least 51 + 220 votes?
Nonetheless, Ford was the incumbent President in 1976 and he did lose the election.
The final national poll tracking aggregate in 2016 was actually more accurate than 2012. In 2012 I believe they overestimated Romney’s strength with independents. He did win that group of voters according to exit polls as predicted, but Obama was closer than predicted. Furthermore while turn-out for Obama did dip from 2008, it did not fall by the margin the Romney campaign were hoping for.
In discussing incumbents that lost, you hae to take into account that in boith 1912 and 1992, there was a viable third party that cost the incumbent re-election. Since 1900, the incumbent has a lost a 2 party race only twice: 1932 and 1980.
U think the Republicans really expected to win in 2012. Who was the idiot who was, I think, the head of the RNC who had a meltdown when Fox–yes Fox–called Ohio, and the election, for Obama at a point in the vote count where Romney was still leading? Of course the statisticians at Fox were right. The details were never explained but it must have been something like that the results in Cleveland hadn’t yet come in and they knew what to expect when it did.
Yes, that was the election of “unskewing the polls”. It’s where we all (hopefully) learned that often party identification is a lagging indicator, not a leading one (i.e. lots of folks called themselves Democrats or Independents because they were voting Obama, so weighting it back to a ‘normal’ distribution of Republicans was incorrect).
That may sound familiar, because it’s part of what the letter Trump’s campaign sent to CNN was complaining about when they asked them to retract their poll.
This is actually backwards. Romney was a much longer shot on election day itself than Trump was. 538, for example, had Romney with an 8% chance of winning. Trump was 28.6%. Or, to put it more in their terms, Trump was a “normal polling error” away (which is exactly what we got), while Romney was “drawing to an inside straight”.
It only feels like Trump was a long-shot due to the long-shot nature of his entire campaign.
Karl Rove.
Back to the OP. There’s a temptation to evaluate things retrospectively after we know what happened. Romney lost, so we look back and decide that this or that moment was the key one. If Romney won, we’d do the same with Obama, and point to some (now nearly forgotten) event and say that it was the key moment where Obama lost the race.
I highly recommend Double Down: Game Change 2012 by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin for a great behind-the-scenes look at the Obama v. Romney matchup (their earlier Game Change, about the 2008 campaign, is equally good). The Obama team really, and I think accurately, believed they could lose that year, as the economy was still struggling and there were a lot of highly motivated GOP Obama-haters who wanted to take back the White House. Obama’s poor performance in the first debate, the relative difficulty of his fundraising compared to four years earlier (which one of his finance staff compared to “fish jumping into the boat”) and the eventual but necessary decision to move towards negative campaigning (the President’s TV ads were far more anti-Romney than pro-Obama) were all key factors.
Actually, Ford won the Vice Presidency with 479 votes (92 in the Senate, and 387 in the House).
Yeah, I read that one (and “Double Down” which covered the 2008 election).
I mean, of course, “Game Change” which covered the 2008 election.
Looking at 538’s approval rating aggregates, the current president has never been above 50% approval in his entire term and has been in net-negative (approval - disapproval) territory since about his second week in office. No other president in their history (going back to Truman) has been so consistently disliked for the duration.
It looks like Obama came close to this guy’s net rating very briefly in the fall of 2011 (-8.6% vs Individual-ONE’s -9.8% at the same point in the terms), but Obama rebounded and went into positive territory by February.
Of the presidents who were re-elected, the 4th year showed a general upward trend. The only time this president has shown a consistent upward trend was Dec '17 to May '18, after which he has been mostly level around -12% net. He did have a brief peak at -3.9% in early April of this year but has slid steadily down to the current -14.4%.
So, overall, the polling data shows him in a very weak position, unlike that of any other president who managed to get re-elected. At this point, if he manages to get re-elected, it would be very anomalous and more than a little questionable.
Pretty much like his entire Presidency, then.
No, Romney never was even close to winning, never mind having it in the bag.
IN and NC reverted to form in 2012, that’s it. Obama won Ohio again, for crissakes.
Shit like that doesn’t change votes, it just reinforces impressions, or in his case, proved them.
I agree with most of this. I’d just add NV as another state to focus on. Nevada usually doesn’t get frequent, high-quality polling, but at this point indications are it could be an important swing state in November.
ETA — I see this is a hijack. To be continued in a different (existing) thread…
At no point did Romney ever had it in the bag. His high-water mark, IIRC, was after the first debate, when he temporarily held a 4% nationwide lead in the polls over Obama. It dissipated quite rapidly and although the election was still narrow even on the eve of Election Day, Romney most certainly never had it in hand.
Romney was fairly convinced he would win up until the returns came in. Part of this was his looking at older polls, part was his being convinced that Obama was using the wrong tactics, and part of this was believing his own propaganda. In reality neither was assured victory.