2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumRomney Campaign Admits: Down in Ohio by "High Single Digits"
President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede.
The Romney campaign, while pleasantly surprised by Obamas lackluster prime-time performance, said the post-convention bounce they hoped for fell well short of expectations and privately lament that state-by-state polling numbers most glaringly in Ohio are working in the presidents favor.
Their map has many more routes to victory, said a top Republican official. Two officials intimately involved in the GOP campaign said Ohio leans clearly in Obamas favor now, with a high single-digit edge, based on their internal tracking numbers of conservative groups. Romney can still win the presidency if he loses Ohio, but its extremely difficult.
The Obama and Romney campaigns anticipate little movement in national polls before the first debate on Oct. 3, which both see as the most important day of this campaign. They also see eye-to-eye on their belief the election will come down to whether Romney can persuade voters he understands the problems of ordinary people and that his solutions are at least marginally better for turning things around economically.
Where the two camps differ and differ starkly is on their theories of the case for navigating the final nine weeks. Romney, armed with more dismal jobs numbers, will run a one-size-fits-all campaign, wrapped around the message that the economy is bad, Obama is to blame, and that change of leadership is absolutely essential. The Republican plan rests heavily on Romneys capacity to bury Obama with negative ads and reap the benefits of his billionaire backers hitting the president even harder, and more relentlessly. This, more than anything else, alarms the high command in Chicago.
A Democratic official said the other big worry for the Obama campaign is that when you dig into the small slice of undecided voters (probably only 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate, according to the campaigns), the demographics are not favorable to Obama: mostly white, many with some college education, economically stressed, largely middle-aged.
Many of them voted for Obama in 2008 and felt good about that vote, and still think Obamas a good person who really tried hard, but the economy sucks for them, said the Democratic official, who has access to reams of internal polls and focus groups.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/80949.html#ixzz25wNUGOL8
JRLeft
(7,010 posts)follows it up with bad news. Every time.
a geek named Bob
(2,715 posts)But this is beginning to smell like a wave election...
Grab your board, Rmoney... The Serfs up...
TroyD
(4,551 posts)Did anyone else notice this line in the Politico article?
The writers state it like it's a fact, while it's clearly just a matter of opinion.
JRLeft
(7,010 posts)Floyd_Gondolli
(1,277 posts)Aparently 3 million fewer people watched this speech compared to his 2008 speech. But in any case 5 million more watched Obama this year than Romney.
Ka-Ching!
TroyD
(4,551 posts)And Bill Clinton beat the NFL.
So how is that lackluster?
Floyd_Gondolli
(1,277 posts)Because as we can all tell, the first $500 million the GOP has spent has worked wonders for them.