It's not going to happen this year. At least I don't think so.
I know that some
conservatives are extremely bullish about Mitt Romney's prospects in Tuesday's
election. many have gone as far as to predict a Romney landslide that includes carrying
Pennsylvania and Michigan .
But, I just don't see it.
I see it as very
likely that Mitt Romney loses on November 6th. But I think there is a very good
chance that he wins the popular vote, which would make the election a no
confidence vote in President Obama while at the same time keeping him in office
for another 4 years.
I hope I'm wrong, of
course. If Romney pulls this off I'll be
so happy that I wo n't even mind eating crow on Wednesday. But the current polling
in the swing states suggests an Obama victory.
If , the polls are to be believed, that is.
Among my co-workers there is a conventional wisdom that the
polls are overestimating the Democratic turnout on Election Day while not
taking conservative enthusiasm into account.
This may be true. I hope it
is. The polls that have the election essentially
tied: CNN, ABC/Washington Post, NBC
Rasmussen and CBS/NYT are each using a sample estimates a 4 or 5-point
Democratic turnout advantage on Election Day. (A poll released by CNN this
afternoon uses a Dem +11 sample)
Why they are doing so is unclear. We really have no way of telling whether these
polling firms skew their polls using specific turnout models or whether their
polling is simply finding a consistent party identification advantage for
Democrats.
Either way, each polling firm has a vested interest in
getting the final prediction as close to the actual vote as possible. There's no reason for them to inflate the
sample group intentionally in order to favor one party or another.
Some who are confident of
a Romney win point to his lead among self-described "Independents," a lead that he has held consistently in every
poll. Some have been saying that even if there is a four point turnout advantage
for Democrats, there's no way that Romney could win Independents by more than 8-points
and not win the popular vote.
But I view the independent number as being slightly
misleading. First of all, the terms
"Independent" and "moderate" are not necessarily
interchangeable. In fact, my guess is
that an unusually large percentage of these Independent voters are very
conservative.
Starting in 2008, there was a visible swing of
self-identified Republicans abandoning the GOP label and moving to the Independent
column. This group of conservatives had
no love for President Obama, to be sure.
But they also pinned a significant amount of blame for the nation's
troubles on what they saw as profligate spending by Republicans during the
years of George W. Bush. This group of
self-described "Independent" voters is now better known as the Tea
Party.
Because of this I'm guessing that the sample size of "Republicans"
in these polls is lower than the number of conservatives who would never even
consider casting a ballot for Barack Obama.
This lowers the expected "Republican" turnout, but raises
Romney's numbers among "Independents."
Another sign that the polls may be off and that Mitt Romney
may be in for a big night is that he seems to be running more strongly than
expected among early voters.
The Obama campaign put a great deal of effort into getting
as many of their supporters as possible to the polls prior to election day. At
this point, though, it would appear that Obama's early vote totals are down compared
to 2008 while Romney's are well above John McCain's--This despite a far greater
emphasis on early voting from Team Obama than in their previous electoral win.
Despite these outliers, I still view a victory for Mitt
Romney as unlikely. Republicans would
have to absolutely swamp the Democrats in voter turnout in the swing states for
Romney to win. As it stands now, it might be close. But it won't be enough.
The truth is that Romney could have very well won this
election, particularly after his dominant debate performance on October, 3. Unfortunately, Obama got extremely lucky in
the "October Surprise" category.
The mainstream media absolutely refused to cover the myriad
of contradictory statements and changing storylines coming from the Administration
on Benghazi . It may be the most blatant example of media
bias by omission in our nation's history.
Had media outlets--other than Fox News--covered the story as the grave
failure of leadership that it actually was, Obama would be packing his bags
tomorrow night.
Then Sandy
hit.
It wasn't as if Obama or his administration actually did
anything substantive in response to Sandy . But Obama showed up for the photo-op. This gave Obama an idiot-proof opportunity to
do something that he hadn't done in a long time: Appear presidential.
The storm response was probably enough to push Obama's surly
debate persona out of people's minds.
This likely sealed the deal for him in the swing states that were
leaning towards him anyway, but where Romney was still polling within the
margin of error.
So my prediction is that Romney gets very close in the
popular vote and may win it. Percentage
wise I'm guessing:
Romney 49%
Obama 48.5%
But the Electoral Map looks like this:
Incumbency is a powerful force in presidential
elections. Only twice in the 200 years
since the two party system has been the norm, has an incumbent party been
kicked out of the White House after only four years. The first time was when Grover Cleveland lost
to Benjamin Harrison in 1888. (We all remember that crazy race.) The next time it happened was, of course, in
1980, when Reagan beat Carter.
But defeating an incumbent president is extremely rare.
Conservatives should keep that in mind and realize that Romney is trying to
accomplish something that almost never happens in American politics.
As much as I hate to say it, my guess is that this
election is going to look a lot like
2004 in which the incumbent hangs on in a divided electorate.
Of course, I could be wrong.
For the country's sake, let's hope that I am.
- Dan
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