Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Decisions

Depending on one's bubble, Romney is either neck and neck or has, basically, no chance. People are going to be bitterly shocked tonight.

Republicans' primary causes for optimism -- Obama's inability to pass the 50% threshold in many swing state polls and Romney's upward trend -- seem dampened post-Sandy. The Romney campaign's decision to sit that out, rather than have surrogates (accurately) screaming "Staten Island is as bad as New Orleans", may haunt them. This reflects the general tenor of the campaign in which the President wildly portrayed Romney as being an evil, corrupt man, and Romney, with great discipline and respect, portrayed the President as like-able enough, but, not the right choice. These strategies reflected the reality of the President's like-ability, now largely spent. Should he win, he may wish, in trying to govern, that he had sacrificed it less.

Romney supporters' last hope lies in the idea that the pollsters demographic-adjustments and likely-voter models are biased. Its certainly true that pollsters (like universities) are more concerned with fairly representing "under-represented" democratic leaning demographics than others. But the more one reads of the sophistication of Obama's turnout operation, the less likely it seems Romney is going to win the "ground game". Obama seems closer to the future, where campaigns use big-data to micro-target swayable voters and leverage affinity networks (including families) to deliver their votes.

If Obama wins the election, Tea Party voters can take heart in this: Republicans have nominated the most moderate voice in the room two elections in a row now and lost to a President from the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." In 2016, Rubio or Christie may find themselves too moderate for Republican primary voters. How does "President Cruz" roll off the tongue?

No comments:

Post a Comment