So after President Obama’s small but measurable convention “bounce” in the polls — and a brilliant effort by his campaign to convince credulous and emotionally involved journalists that this four-point jump means Mitt Romney has already lost — there is considerable worry in the air among Republicans.
Not to mention a deep degree of condescending concern among those journalists, who are expressing brow-furrowed worry about the difficulty of Romney’s road ahead.
Romney has so many fewer paths to 270 electoral votes! There’s talk of private Romney polls that have Obama in the lead in all-important Ohio in the high single digits! How can he win without Ohio?!
Aw, poor Mitt — whatever can he do?
You can almost see the Cheshire cat grin on their faces as they type these things.
It’s astonishing that people who’ve covered politics for decades are trafficking in this nonsense.
In every battleground state, including Ohio, the nonpartisan polls separating the two candidates are within the margin of error — meaning that there is no statistical difference in support between Obama and Romney. Though the pollster Scott Rasmussen has Obama up 50-45 nationally, Obama is only up 1 point in Rasmussen’s poll of 12 swing states.
Did Obama’s convention go better than Romney’s? Probably. Will it make a difference? No.
The election is in eight weeks. Over the course of those eight weeks, there will be three Obama-Romney debates (plus a Biden-Ryan one), which will have larger audiences than the conventions did, closer to the election.
Obama has two advantages Romney doesn’t: a lapdog media and the presidential megaphone — and he’ll use both to his advantage.
On the other hand, Romney now has the advantage in campaign funds and in the most basic sense: Roughly two-thirds of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction or on the wrong track. No one has ever won re-election with such numbers.
Given all this, the rational way to view the race is as essentially a tie in which Obama may be, at this moment, a little bit ahead.
Nonetheless, the media onslaught has spooked people who wish to see Obama defeated and Romney elected.
This is understandable, and Romney headquarters in Boston better pay attention to it. Right now, one area in which Obama is leading by a mile is the one in which he bolsters and heartens his own existing support.
Boston and Romney himself are proving absolutely awful on this front.
The Romney campaign seems to have settled on an argument that Obama’s poll strength is just a post-convention “sugar high,” as its pollster Neil Newhouse said in a strikingly infelicitous memo released yesterday that offered no data-driven support for that view and mainly dwelled on how much money Romney has.
It’s interesting Newhouse hit on the dismissive description of a “sugar high” — because a sugar rush is what Romney’s side needs.
That’s what a day-to-day campaign is — it’s all a sugar high. It’s supposed to provide a boost, a pick-me-up, a rush to those who are following it closely with the hopes that it will succeed with a spirited speech, a potent soundbite, a lively crowd, a good interview.
That can be supplemented by more substantive nutrition in the form of substantive policy addresses, position papers, etc.
The Romney camp is doing neither. It’s too intent on winning over the small batch of uncommitted and independent voters by saying absolutely nothing that might possibly offend them.
The problem with that strategy is a) it means he doesn’t say much, and b) it does nothing to stimulate the enthusiasm of those already in his corner.
Those folks in his corner are now experiencing the opposite of a sugar high from the post-convention polls showing Obama in the lead.
Romney & Co. are wrong if they think negative feelings toward Obama are sufficient to motivate their voters. These people would like very much to believe in their candidate.
That’s not happening now. A CNN/ORC poll released yesterday shows that only 47 percent of Romney voters are on his side because they want to vote for him; 48 percent are casting a vote against Obama.
He has to give those voters more. He owes those voters more, because without more— and with a relentless press barrage designed to depress and worry them — their worry will deepen into panic, and possibly into despair.
At which point, all the votes of those soccer moms in Ohio who are disappointed in Obama won’t matter much.