With five days to go, we find ourselves in the midst of yet another unprecedented presidential election — as has been the case with every race (save 1996) since the billionaire Ross Perot emerged out of nowhere to bring the crazy to the people in 1992.
Sandy’s deadly emergence just eight days before the election adds another new element whose political effect is almost impossible to predict.
It’s probably even harder for those of us in the affected area to judge. We’re more consumed by the story than most Americans — likely more interested, for example, in the presidential visit to New Jersey than the rest of the nation, and imagining it will have a larger effect on Tuesday’s results than it will.
But who can say? Maybe whatever goodwill benefit Obama generates from his post-storm leadership will be counteracted by the bad mood of 1 million Pennsylvanians — many of them in the Philadelphia area, crucial for Democrats — who lost power thanks to Sandy.
The state, once thought safe for President Obama, has moved appreciably toward Mitt Romney these past two weeks. The president needs his Pennsylvania electorate engaged and enthusiastic. If they’re tired and beset, will they turn out as he needs them to?
I have no idea, and neither does anybody else. It’s one more part of an unprecedented situation.
How unprecedented? Consider this: If Obama wins Tuesday, it will almost certainly be the first time in American history that a president won re-election with a smaller margin than in his first. He pulled 53 percent of the vote in 2008; no one on earth thinks he’ll match that.
Now consider this: George W. Bush’s vote total grew by a fifth from 2000 to 2004. Bill Clinton got 43 percent of the vote in 1992 and 49 percent in 1996. Ronald Reagan won 40 states in 1980 and 49 in 1984.
Richard Nixon went from 43 percent in 1968 to 61 percent in 1972. Dwight Eisenhower rose to 57 percent in 1956 after getting 55 percent in 1952. FDR went from 42 states in 1932 to 48 states in 1936. And so on and so on.
Obama’s certain drop in his vote percentage has many causes, chief among them the fact that the country is not in good shape and he’s been in the White House for four years now. And he simply can’t generate the enthusiasm he produced in 2008. To take one example, college campuses that bubbled with excitement then are unrecognizable now.
A professor at a large public university in a northeastern swing state e-mailed to say: “There is little to no real interest inthis election by the student body.In 2008, like most colleges and universities, there was what amounted to near mass Obama hysteria . . . If my school is typical the youth vote will return to its usual low level.”
That precipitous drop in enthusiasm is across the board. Indeed, most polling (even poll results the Obama people like) shows Romney dominating Obama on voter enthusiasm by margins of 10 percent to 20 percent.
Speaking of polling, Obama had a great day yesterday — but only if you believe the electorate of 2012 will be as heavily Democratic as it was in 2008, when Democrats made up 39 percent of voters and Republicans only 32 percent. If you want to believe that, go right ahead; Linus believed in the Great Pumpkin, too.
The Obama people want very much to make this reversal-of-momentum argument stick. Why? Well, I’ve seen private polling in the last day that suggests they need to shore up a growing sense among voters that they’re on the road to defeat. These polls in nine swing states ask, “Do you believe that (Mitt Romney/Barack Obama) is gaining ground, losing ground or staying where he is?”
Fifty percent of likely voters said Mitt Romney is gaining ground; 23 percent said Obama. Only 14 percent said Romney is losing ground, against 37 percent who said the same of the president.
Translation: It’s starting to sink in that Mitt Romney really may win. If that impression deepens going into the weekend, it will build on itself until Election Day.
Or not. Who knows? We’re in uncharted waters.