I think because this recession is unlike anything since the Great Depression, when we reelected FDR. Because the solution from the GOP from the economy seems to be to give tax breaks to the wealthy so they can reinvest in jobs - and that doesn’t really seem to be getting bought by the middle class - the ones that know that you put your capital in low cost of labor locations - not the U.S. Or those that aren’t sure why a 15% effective tax rate is appropriate if you make millions of dollars a year. Because just as some people see gay marriage as the end of civilization, others are seeing a backlash against women and minorities - and for some people, that is far more frightening than 9% unemployment or a slow GDP growth rate.
The GOP position on tax cuts is nonsense and politically damaging to boot, but it’s not the whole story. It’s also about who is trusted to regulate smarter and run fiscal policy better. Democrats were in a great position to lock down the fiscal responsibility brand. But instead of repeating the Clinton plan, they went back to their old tricks of jacking up spending and regulating everything to death. That doctrine was rejected in 1980 and it hasn’t gained in public acceptance since then.
Now it’s up to Republicans to show that they can govern, assuming they get the chance.
People who are complaining about the economy or abortion or Romney’s VP pick, or are talking about how women vote Democrat (like that hasn’t happened before, and is somehow a totally new thing in 2012) are missing the point, I think. The question is not whether Romney DESERVES to win. It’s HOW he can win.
The only demographic that matters are the 538 people who cast electoral votes. That’s it. The only way to really discuss this issue is to look at an electoral vote map. There isn’t any realistic possibility Romney can win California’s 55 votes or New York’s 29 or Illinois’s 20. There isn’t any way Obama can win Texas’s 38 votes or any Bible Belt state. So the question is, can Romney pick up the swing states that will tip him over?
The difficulty Romney faces is that based in the 2008 results and current trends, there are more electoral votes solidly in Obama’s camp than in his. Obama won 365 EVs in 2008. He has almost certainly lost North Carolina so he loses 15 there, but Romney, realistically, now has to do the following to win an additional 90 votes:
Win Florida (29)
Win Iowa (6)
Win Virginia (13)
Win Ohio (20)
Win Wisconsin (10)
Win Colorado (9)
Win Nevada (6)
Is that possible? Absolutely; again, one debate can crush you, or one gaffe. But geez, it’s an uphill climb. All you guys complaining about the economy miss the point that right now the polls say he wins anyway. The question is what can Romney do to flip those states, most of which currently lean Obama?
This isn’t something where Romney can target one state. He needs a general, country-wide rise in support to flip enough states to win, because there’s about 200 electoral votes that he just cannot hold any realistic hope of winning.
So how’s he going to do it? Or what will happen that will destroy Obama?
I think the general proposition is that the 2008 results are not all that relevant, and that the economy will cause enough change to flip those states to Romney.
Stealing from Mark Shields…
I look at the economy and think: How can Obama win? Then I look at Romney and think: How can Obama lose?
I never understand questions like the OP’s, and I’ve seen them on both sides. Any candidate can win. People ask questions like we have compulsory voting and the numbers really mean something. But the fact is in even the most exciting elections, you still have about 40% of people who could vote not bothering to because they don’t feel the need to. So how do you win? Make some of those people angry or impressed enough to be arsed to show up at the polls!
It worked for Obama in 2008, didn’t it? Lots of first time voters showed up to vote for him because they were either inspired enough or pissed enough about the previous 8 years.
Sober security professionals of the highest reputations, and far more knowledgeable than you or I, have expressed much suspicion about the 2004 election. I’m a poor Googler, but can find this link and this one.
That isn’t what the polls say. About 35 out of 50 states are effectively already decided, and the current polls generally suggest an Obama victory based on results and trends in the swing states. This isn’t one poll, it’s ALL of them.
What should Romney do to change that?
Convert to some mainstream Protestant religion and pray for economic catastrophe.
That may be his most likely route but are you looking at Nate Silver’s maps? The same ones I am? Colorado and Iowa he has both at over 60% probability as Obama. Florida is a virtual coin flip. Hard to say that that supports counting them as in the bag for Romney. Virginia at a 60% probability for Obama is far from in the bag for Obama but it is an uphill battle for Romney to win it. And Ryan is not broadly popular in Wisconsin - maybe he’ll bump the state closer a bit, maybe not, but most optimistically (to a GOP POV) to a coin flip.
And the proposition here is based on current sentiments even with the current sputtering slowly forward economy. He needs to win in states where he’d very likely lose if the election was held today, in an election cycle that has been anything but very volatile. Sure it can happen … in each state what matters is who comes out to vote that day and lots can change by Election Day, including events that are in no one’s control (or at least no American’s control).
But yes to win he needs great turn out from his supporters with apathy from Obama’s and much of the middle, and/or something to happen that changes the dynamic significantly in his direction.
Right, that’s basically what happened with Reagan in '80 but with different circumstances. It was a statistically close race until an October debate shortly prior to the election. While on the merits of the debate, Carter was considered by some to have won, Reagan made a now famous “speech” at the end of the debate that resonated with voters and pushed people who had been wavering into his camp.
It was a dramatic effect, and because it happened so late in the election to my knowledge most of the big national polls did not reflect it. (The White House has traditionally at least in the last 30-40 years conducted its own poll right before the election, usually with a much larger sample size than standard polls to push the margin of error down. Carter is known to have heard the results of these polls the day before the election and was basically told by his advisers that the Presidency was lost.)
Now, I’m not predicting anything like that from Romney (he just doesn’t have the likability of Reagan or the ability to sway people like that), but that’s a very realistic thing. A politician does something to boost his popularity and in general it’s going to boost his popularity nationally, not just in one or two states.
Another strange bit of “analysis” I keep seeing about this election is people talking about how hard it will be for Romney “because he has to win lots of States that McCain lost in '08.” To me that’s the height of “nothing-speak” it’s blatantly obvious Romney has to win states that losing candidate failed to win if he wants to win himself.
I’m not sure what I said actually means anything the more I think about it. One part of it is that the states with the highest black populations are so heavily Republican overall that the blacks in those states essentially “do not matter” because they aren’t going to be able to have any hope of turning the state into a win for Obama. That’s a true point.
However as I thought about it some I don’t know that the black vote is especially important in any state, even battleground states. Namely because it has historically been so monolithic, the voters that matter are the ones who can actually be swayed to vote for a certain candidate. Because the black vote is so monolithic, basically every election since 1980 you can assume they’re voting overwhelmingly for the Democrat candidate.
But even that is only sort of true, because obviously in any close election you can point to anything as a cause for the result. If Ohio goes for Obama by 5,000 votes and he gets 95% of the black vote instead of the “average” of 90% that Democrats get, then you could say his special appeal to blacks (his skin color) won him the election in Ohio. But that’s only true to a point, because he had to attract millions of other votes for the election to be close there in the first place.
I don’t really know that this is true. I read a lot of more-or-less independent news sources (The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor etc) and all I’ve read are countless articles saying that Obama’s great strength is in speeches and that he’s actually a weak debater. Almost everyone thinks he was a weak debater compared to Hillary Clinton, for example. Likewise all those analyses of debate performance have said Romney is actually a very strong debater, and that he actually has more debate experience under his belt than basically any candidate we’ve ever had (50+ hours in this election alone.)
People who debated against him all seem to agree that he is extremely good at debate prep and the mechanics of the debate format itself.
However all of these articles all say the same thing: Romney is the superior technical debater, but he has an Achilles Heel. Perhaps because his technique is to be extremely prepared for every possible question, when Romney is hit with something in a debate that he was no prepared for, he is bad at thinking on his feet. That’s what lead to the $10,000 bet, for example. But the analysis I read says Romney has only had that happen like four times in like 56 hours of debating. (It also is interesting this weakness appears to have always been there, in his campaign to unseat Ted Kennedy in '92 Romney overall was considered to make Kennedy look like a bumbler in the debate that they had, but when Kennedy made an off the cuff remark in response to a pretty vicious attack Romney made, Romney was unable to effectively respond.)
FWIW I think Romney will lose for much of the same reason Kerry lost. Kerry was uninspiring, Romney is uninspiring, Kerry didn’t stick his neck out and make a clear and prominent alternative choice to Bush, and Romney is following that path.
Yes, I know both Kerry and Romney had platforms and policy proposals and all that stuff you need to in order to run for President. However so far I don’t feel Romney has passionately adopted any particular alternative to Obama’s governance and made it the focus of a big portion of his campaign time. Instead he’s doing what Kerry did, repeat over and over again how bad four years of Bush have been and how we need to make a change.
The way the Romney campaign has been going so far based on the tactics it is using I’d project a close popular vote and Obama winning the EV by 30 votes (so around 300 EVs for Obama.) The only way this campaign strategy unseats the President is through deus ex machina in the form of a stock market collapse or a huge increase in unemployment or something of that nature.
I’m not a professional campaign manager but if I was managing the Romney campaign I’d say come the RNC convention and after there needs to be one or two major policy proposals that have wide appeals that Romney needs to adopt and make a center piece for the rest of the election. If you want to unseat a sitting President you have two options: one is have the sitting President be so bad or the state of the country be so bad that the voters just vote for you to unseat him (which I don’t believe will happen to Obama) or two you present a compelling case as to why you’d be a superior choice as President.
Romney has basically two more things that he can personally do in order to try to swing things in his favor: (1) he can deliver a rousing speech at the GOP convention next week and woo a bunch of independents and/or parts of his base that still haven’t been sold on him yet, or (2) deliver a strong debate performance. Anything else that could cede the election to him are basically out of his control - a massive unemployment increase, a European implosion, a stock market crash, etc.
Of the two options that I listed, I think the second one is his most likely possibility. I just highly doubt that Romney is going to be able to deliver a rousing and inspiring speech at the convention next week that’ll somehow manage to trounce Obama’s remarks at the Dems’ convention in early September.
As for the debates, yeah, it’s possible that Romney could do a good job against the POTUS, but even that option is still highly unlikely to me. In the debate setting, Romney is going to have to defend the more extreme elements of his agenda as well as the countless flip-flops that he has made over the course of his campaign. Going face-to-face against Obama is going to be rough for Mittens simply because the POTUS is bound to hammer Romney over the head with those weaknesses, and it’ll be difficult for him to weasel his way out of those sorts of questions.
Blacks make up about 13% of the electorate, and have gone democratic consistently at about 90% for the last several presidential elections. Obama winning 94% instead of the 90% that Gore or Kerry won isn’t that big a deal.
The GOP is alienating women, but only some women. Married white women still like the GOP. Single women tend to be democratic 2-1. But according to the polling I’ve seen, the war on women hasn’t moved the electorate much.
What, you get married and change sides? 
Some questions of fact for those who may know:
How often have the polls been as stable as this?
I know that convention bounces are expected and tend to not last, but are there any times when there has been no appreciable convention bounce? If so have any of those candidates won?
I hear the republicans have an ace up their sleeve. They are going to make the claim that Obama wasn’t born in America and therefore isn’t eligible to be president. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Romney currently has 212 electoral votes according to polling, with Florida tied. That puts him at 241. All he needs to do is gain Ohio and Wisconsin for the tie, or Ohio and Virginia for the win. Or Virginia, Wisconsin, and Colorado for the win.