Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Individual polls show varying snapshots of the Obama-Romney race: NBC News and the Wall Street Journal gave Obama a 5-point national lead in a survey published Tuesday night, while an AP-GfK poll released Wednesday morning pegged the president’s lead at just 1 point. Gallup’s tracking poll, meanwhile, showed Obama’s post-convention polling bounce fading to a 1-point lead.
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The rosiest picture of the race for Obama came this afternoon from the Pew Research Center, which found Obama drawing 51 percent of the vote to Romney’s 43 percent, leading on nearly every issue question and fighting his challenger to a draw on who would better handle the economy.
From the fog of survey data available on the 2012 race, some consistent, post-convention trends have clearly begun to emerge. In the most credible national polls, Obama rarely leads Romney by more than a few points. But the president is almost invariably in the lead.(Also on POLITICO: Romney woes jangle GOP nerves)
These polls were taken after the parties’ conventions, but mostly before the release this week of a controversial video of Romney this week in which he says that 47 percent of people don’t pay income taxes and are dependent on the government for services. Some data was collected before the attacks on U.S. diplomatic outposts in North Africa; some was collected afterward.
More problematic for Romney is the state-level data that gives Obama a slight edge in more than enough states to block his challenger from amassing 270 electoral college votes. Because of the makeup of the electoral map, Romney has to win nearly all the swing states on the table, while Obama only has to win a handful.
Of the biggest prizes up for grabs — Ohio, Virginia, Florida and North Carolina — Obama is the favorite in two, according to public surveys. NBC/Wall Street Journal polling and the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling gave Obama an edge in Ohio in the mid-to-high single digits. In Virginia, one survey from the Washington Post and another from Quinnipiac University, CBS News and the New York Times placed Obama at or above the 50 percent mark.
(Also on POLITICO: Romney 2012 RIP? Not so fast)
There has been little public polling in Florida — without which it becomes much harder for Romney to win — and strategists on both sides say the race there remains close. Only in North Carolina is Romney believed to have a slim edge.
In the bigger picture, it would take a national shift of several percentage points or the flipping of more than a few major swing states to put Romney back in the lead, and the momentum — with less than two months to go, doesn’t seem to be moving in the challenger’s direction.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81392.html#ixzz26xwFWWH8
Noonan: Romney running 'incompetent' campaign
Noonan: Romney running 'incompetent' campaign
Peggy Noonan takes out the dagger and cuts deep in her latest WSJ column, going where few have publicly about Mitt Romney's general election effort:
It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. It’s always been too small for the moment. All the activists, party supporters and big donors should be pushing for change. People want to focus on who at the top is least constructive and most responsible. Fine, but Mitt Romney is no puppet: He chooses who to listen to. An intervention is in order. “Mitt, this isn’t working.”
She also takes note of the Romney campaign strategy of fundraising quite frequently, with few public events, in the name of stockpiling cash for a final-weeks ad blitz, and calls the logic "slightly crazy:"
... at the end will they make much difference? Obama is said to have used a lot of his money early on, to paint a portrait of Romney as Thurston Howell III, as David Brooks put it. That was a gamble on Obama’s part: spend it now, pull ahead in the battlegrounds, once we pull ahead more money will come in because money follows winners, not losers.
The entire column is not uplifting for Romney's supporters, many of whom are already feeling fairly grim after a rough few weeks, and it's not meant to be. What has been surprising for Republicans, including some of Romney's donors, has been how different the general election campaign has been from a primary campaign effort that was more able to win the day.
On the home page tonight, my colleagues Glenn Thrush and Byron Tau note that the race is not over yet, for all the hand-wringing among Republicans and ball-spiking among Democrats - the fundamentals nationally still have Obama as a weak and vulnerable incumbent.
The race is winnable, empirically. But Romney has been on defense for a solid stretch now, unable to push out his own narrative. And the problem, Noonan is arguing, is less with the team than the man running. Romney has proven impervious to calls to shift strategy in the past, and it's hard to see him doing something dramatic now, with the first debate in two weeks.
His team is hoping for a national approach that can jolt numbers in some of the swing states - like Ohio, where Romney is, according to private polling on both sides, in a hole - and a press narrative that says the race is still close (the Gallup numbers nationally provided some measure of that earlier today). They're also hoping to highlight things like 14-year-old video that suggests Obama believes what his detractors already think he believes.
It will likely take a few factors to shake things up, including a major Obama stumble. It is by no means out of the realm of possibility. But the days are going.
* This post has been updated
Read more about: Mitt Romney, Peggy Noonan
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