According to the Princeton Election Consortium, Mitt actually got a negative bounce out of his convention. The data also show that the Bain/taxes attacks were hurting Romney, while the “you didn’t build that” blather hasn’t helped him.
Other polls also show that President Obama has widened a small lead over Romney.
Although I don’t want to be complacent about Obama’s election chances, I hope this means the Democratic message is resonating with people.
Click only if you have the stomach — Mark Steyn responds to Sandra Fluke’s speech at the DNC with some misdirected verbiage suggesting that the oppression of women is necessary for the good of the economy.
Ann Romney wants you to know that reproductive and marital rights are not what this election is about, so you people had better stop asking her about it.
Ann Romney also wants you people to know that her husband is just oozing with goodness. No, Queen Ann, those are lies. Way different.
We now know that the Romney campaign is targeting eight states — Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and New Hampshire. Per Nate Silver, the only one of those currently leaning toward Romney is North Carolina. Jonathan Chait writes,
The reason this looks worrisome for Romney is that he’s pursuing an electoral-college strategy that requires him nearly to run the table of competitive states. The states where Romney is not competing (and which aren’t obviously Republican, either) add up to 247 electoral votes. The eight states where Romney is competing add up to a neat 100 electoral votes, of which Romney needs 79 and Obama just 23. If you play with the electoral possibilities, you can see that this would mean Obama could win with Florida alone or Ohio plus a small state or Virginia plus a couple small states, and so on.
Unless I’m missing something badly here, Romney needs either a significant national shift his way — possibly from the debates or some other news event — or else to hope that his advertising advantage is potent enough to move the dial in almost every swing state in which he’s competing.
IMO the targeting makes sense if you have been following Nate Silver’s data. Polling in most states is remarkably lopsided, heavily favoring one candidate over the other. Even if you had all the money in the world to burn, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to advertise in those solid red or blue states. In less than 60 days, barring some unforeseen event, no way the needle is going to move that much.
The Confidence Game
Nate Silver has one of his usual clear-headed analyses of the two campaigns going forward — “A Referendum or a Choice?” Basically, Romney is running a referendum campaign on President Obama’s first term, and President Obama is running a choice campaign, challenging Americans to decide what America will be going forward.
As I’ve been saying this week, Romney seems to be marketing himself as the generic alternative to President Obama. This assumes voters are so disappointed by the President’s first term they will vote in just about anyone who seems suitable without asking many questions. Nate writes of the GOP convention,
Republicans spent some time trying to remedy Mr. Romney’s mediocre favorability ratings. The strong speech by Ann Romney, and the portions of Mr. Romney’s speech about his family, may have had a humanizing effect.
Even here, however, the intent seemed more to neutralize Mr. Romney’s perceived personal weaknesses — to make him an acceptable alternative under the referendum paradigm — than to offer an affirmative case for why Mr. Romney should be president under the choice paradigm.
Under this paradigm, it makes sense that the GOP is putting more energy into tearing the President down than in offering specifics about what a Romney Administration might do, because the pathetic fact is Romney doesn’t have much to offer in the way of the vision thing. He may have a vision, but it’s not one most Americans would like. Under this paradigm, the GOP wants America to think the President is alien and eeeevil and, you know, not white. But, hey, we’ve got this alternate candidate who has a pretty family and nice hair! So try him out! What could go wrong?
The President presents the election as a choice between two paths — we work together toward a better future or give the country back to the people who trashed it in the first place.
Obviously I think the second argument is more persuasive, but the electorate doesn’t always see things the way I do.
A confidence game is an attempt to defraud someone by first gaining their confidence. Essentially, Mitt needs to pull off a confidence game. To win, he has to persuade the electorate they can have confidence in him without letting them in on what he really intends to do.
This has been done before. Nate points to the 2000 election as a kind of choice-referendum tossup. Al Gore was a referendum candidate offering himself as the unexciting but responsible steward of the Clinton economy; and George W. Bush was a choice candidate, promising everyone tax cuts, free beer and a pony. And while the outcome of the election was not determined honestly, it has to be said that a very substantial minority voted for the pony.
The differences between then and now are that, first, then the electorate was complacent about the economy and possibly didn’t think the election outcome would make that much difference to it; and two, in 2000 the Right was tightly unified and totally dominated mass media to a larger degree than it does now. Plus the campaign journalists decided they didn’t like Al Gore, and it showed. So the narrative became that Dubya was a moderate and successful Texas governor and Al Gore was a space alien. But given everything going against him, Gore still won the popular vote.
Today the electorate is not complacent at all, the Democrats are unified while the Republicans are in a bit of a shambles, and while mass media still favors the Right, the Left is no longer completely shut out. Plus, the “choice” guy is likeable while the “referendum” guy is the space alien.
So, barring some unforeseen event that knocks the President off his game, IMO Romney has a much steeper hill to climb to win the election. And I don’t think just knocking down Obama alone is going to do the trick for him. He has to persuade voters they can trust him, that they can have confidence in him, and I doubt he’s got it in him to do that. I think voters are more on guard against being scammed than they were in 2000. And Mittens really is a space alien, you know.
The Bounce
Regarding bounces — there’s already a news story out saying that Obama isn’t getting a bounce. Ignore that; most of that polling took place before Big Bill spoke. We won’t know if the convention moved any numbers until next week. As Steve Kornacki said, if that convention didn’t create a bounce, no convention could create a bounce.
However, it’s possible there won’t be much of a bounce, because there appears to be only a tiny sliver of voters who are genuinely undecided.
But Romney needed a bounce more than Obama does. The electoral college scorecard has President Obama ahead. Romney needs to change more minds than Obama does.
The Blitz
The Romney campaign is launching a blitz of 15 new ads in eight swing states. The ads are targeted to both local and national issues. Here is the voice-over text to one ad:
“This president can ask us to be patient. This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault. But this president cannot tell us that you’re better off today than when he took office,” Romney says in the file footage.
Then the narrator kicks in: “Here in North Carolina, we’re not better off under President Obama. His economic and trade policies with China have destroyed thousands of jobs. The Romney plan? Stand up to China, reverse obama job-killing policies, create over 350,000 new jobs for North Carolina.”
I dunno. I think the part about standing up to China is weird, but whatever. What do you think?
I have to go out for a while this evening, although I hope to be back to hear President Obama speak. In the meantime, go ahead and comment.
Update: Just got back — Biden is speaking– this should be the video of Jennifer Granholm —
If no video is displayed, here is a link.
Interesting observation from The American Conservative, where Daniel Larison admits that the case Clinton made against Romney and Ryan was devastating —
… it was all the more devastating because Romney and Ryan made no concerted effort to make the case for their ticket and their agenda last week. … Part of what made Clinton’s speech so devastating is that he compiled all of these objections, linked them together, and presented them to a large television audience all at once in a way that was easily digestible.
Another reason the speech was so devastating to them was that he gave the sort of speech that Ryanmaniacs might have once imagined that Ryan would deliver and the sort that some Romney supporters still imagine Romney is capable of giving. Romney-Ryan was supposed to be the presidential ticket of the “data-driven†manager and his budget wonk sidekick, and between the absence of any significant policy discussion last week and what happened tonight that has lost all credibility. Clinton outperformed both of them in terms of discussing policy details, and underscored just how meaningless the “campaign of ideas†phrase has been. Ryan fans had been convinced for over a year that the election had to be a contest over “big ideas,†and when it came time to engage in that contest their party leaders didn’t even try.
There are several possible reasons they didn’t even try. It might be that they do have a substantive argument for themselves tucked away somewhere, and they haven’t trotted it out because they think the electorate is bored with that detail stuff. I get that vibe from a lot of the Right, actually; they just want the red meat, not the wonky vegetables.
So instead, the GOP decided to package Romney as a swell guy who can be trusted to take care of things, and you don’t need to worry your pretty little head how he’s going to do it. That approach also assumes that people are so disappointed with Barack Obama that no one has to make a substantive pitch about why Romney would be better. They think the electorate is so desperate to find an alternative they’ll vote for anybody who has a nice family and looks good in a suit.
If that’s the case, IMO it’s a miscalculation. A lot of people probably would consider voting for someone else, but not necessarily ANYBODY else.
Or, maybe Romney and Ryan are saving the juicy details for the debates. They aren’t trotting them out beforehand because they don’t want to give the Dems time to craft counterarguments. In which case, maybe those arguments aren’t all that solid.
Another possibility is that they have a substantive argument, but they are keeping it hidden because they know most of the electorate would run away screaming if they knew what it was. (Along those lines, do read Tom Levenson, “Visions of the Apocalypse: Not in Fire, Nor in Ice, But in the Emptying Beds of a Nursing Home.”)
Or, maybe they don’t have a substantive argument, just a facsimile of one. Ryan’s budget possibly seemed brilliant to a lot of journalists who briefly looked at it — I assume it has, like, numbers and stuff — but the few knowledgeable people who actually studied the thing generally have been aghast at how flimsy it is. Krugman has been calling it a “fantasy.”
This takes us to two sets of sub-possibilities — I should be diagramming this — one, they honestly didn’t understand their calculations were hallucinatory; or two, they knew all along the calculations were hallucinatory and didn’t think anyone (but a few liberal wonks) would notice.
If we go with sub-possibility one — I can easily imagine that Ryan has such faith in his ideology that he didn’t think he had to make all the numbers crunch; his ideas are just so self-evidently true (to him). However, if he still thinks that, I don’t know why he would be shy about defending his ideas. Possibly someone recently got through to him that his grand ideas really are not defensible. Drag them out of the Fairy Castle of True Belief and they melt into a pathetic little puddle.
And, finally, maybe they’ve both been faking it. In which case the debates will be fun.
Update: Another possibility, from Ed Kilgore:
Larison’s analysis strengthens my growing belief that in choosing Ryan as a running-mate, Romney had zero intention of making a robust defense of the Ryan Budget or pursuing anything else the conservative movement was panting for him to say or do (other than the racially-tinged demagoguery about welfare). It was precisely the opposite: he figured he could shut up the noisy ideologues by offering them the symbolic prize of Ryan and then running his campaign in exactly the non-substantive way he always intended. This end-the-primaries strategy, as I’ve called it earlier, depended, of course, on swing-voter ignorance about Ryan and indeed the entire GOP agenda, and on Democratic complicity in a campaign about pre-set cartoon caricatures rather than anything that might look like an “idea.â€
Plausible. And if that’s the case, it’s also plausible Romney will shift and allow Ryan more leeway to make a case for his ideas. But his ideas are nuts — see above about the Fairy Castle. And if that’s what Romney thought he got very bad advice from somebody (Karl Rove?).
This surprises me — Romney and the GOP SuperPACs are pulling ads from Michigan and Pennsylvania, meaning they don’t think they have a prayer. And the Los Angeles Times reports that in the past few days most Romney television ads have disappeared in Ohio and some other battleground states.
We know this can’t be because the Romney campaign and the SuperPACs are short of dough. They’re rolling in it. I also can’t believe the RRs are giving up on battleground states. So what’s up?
My guess is that they decided the old ads weren’t working and pulled them before they have new ads in the can and ready to go. But how long does it take to crank out a campaign ad? Even a so-so ad would be better than no ad at all, considering the Obama campaign is still running ads full tilt.
Of course, maybe they’re all just too incompetent to run an effective campaign.
Andrew Romano at Daily Beast suggests that Republicans are stunned by Mitt’s un-bounce from his convention.
Republicans were predicting that Romney would follow in Clinton’s footsteps (rather than, say, Dole’s). Wait until the convention, they argued. Wait until all the Santorumites and Newtheads rally around Mitt in Tampa. Wait until the country sees him speak. Romney’s underwater ratings will evaporate shortly thereafter, and he’ll never look back. …
… And so, given that least one former nominee had used a convention to dig himself out of a big favorability hole, I figured that now, five days after Tampa, was the right time to check back in and see if Romney’s own popularity problem had finally cleared itself up.
Unfortunately for the GOP, it hasn’t.
Romney has issued a few ineffectual bleats this week about the Dem convention being a “celebration of failure” and the platform being “extreme,” but that’s not going to resonate with anyone but wingnuts and baggers. I suspect Romney and his aides are having one meeting after another right now about the direction of the campaign, and by next week we may see an entirely retooled Romney effort. But what could they possibly try that they haven’t tried already?
First off, if you missed The Speech (or just want to watch it again), you can watch it at Political Carnival. The Washington Post also has the speech, plus a sort of tweet-annotated transcript. There’s another transcript-as-delivered here. Don’t bother with speech-as-prepared-for-delivery transcripts, since Big Bill spoke off the cuff so much I understand the teleprompter operator gave up before the speech was over.
Watching Bill Clinton take the stage at the Democratic National Convention and take over the room with his first few, simple words – “We are here to nominate a President and I’ve got one in mind†— was like watching a great violinist follow a group of gifted amateurs.
It occurs to me that the Obama campaign can fire their advertising people and just run clips of Bill Clinton’s speech for the rest of the campaign. Even if they don’t do that, I have no doubt we will be seeing a barrage of Big Bill videos over the next few hours.
So that was actually three things. Anyway, what struck me most was how much Arkansas we’re-heah-to-nominate-a-president-I-got-one-in-mahnd he let into his voice. As Chuck Berry once put it, the man was campaign-shoutin’ like a Southern diplomat. (How much you want to bet that the man once owned a coffee-colored Cadillac, and that he knows at least five women named Nadine?) G’s were dropped all over the stage. The ad-libs were all tossed off in that wonderful character we’ve come to know as the smartest little boy around the cracker barrel. Willard Romney was out there somewhere and he was being utterly eviscerated by Floyd The Barber. And the only people who look more ridiculous than he does the morning after are all those media brainiacs who were saying how smart the Republicans were being in “driving a wedge” between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. There is a reason you should be careful what you wish for.
You might have missed this, but about a month ago Dick Morris confidently predicted that Bill Clinton would vote for Mitt Romney. In a kind of good Democrat-bad Democrat routine, Romney has been insinuating that he is President Clinton’s heir, and more like Clinton than President Obama is like Clinton.
Just yesterday, before The Speech, Paul Ryan said,
“My guess is we will get a great rendition of how good things were in the 1990s, but we’re not going to hear much about how things have been the last four years,†Ryan told the crowd outside the Dallas County Courthouse. “And, by the way, under President Clinton, we got welfare reform. Chuck Grassley, everybody else in Congress — we got welfare reform, which moved people from welfare to work to get people out of poverty. President Obama is rolling back welfare reform.â€
Oh, the video possibilities are endless. It will be interesting to see if the Romney-Ryan “welfare” ads stay on the air; all the Dems have to do to kill that snake is to run ads of Big Bill rebutting it.
An interesting thing about the speech: At the beginning, over Twitter, we were fed the usual diet of snarky conservative comments. That’s fine. We liberals tossed off some snarky tweets last week during the Tampa convention. That’s how it goes, and some of them are funny even when you disagree with them.
But the funny thing was, over the course of the speech, those tweets became fewer in number. Then they disappeared. That’s when you can tell the other side is worried. Clinton reached people. He revved up the base, but he did a lot more than that.
Today the Right is in full sour grapes mode, callng the speech “long” and even “a swing and a miss.”
Sometime last night, Ari Melber tweeted “RNC gave us Eastwooding, DNC offers Clintoning, a fact-driven, policy argument presented to voters like they are thinking adults.” And Matt Latimer wrote at Daily Beast,
Here’s why I think Clinton’s speech was successful: He did what almost no one at the Republican convention tried to do, what few conventions bother to do anymore. He treated the American people like thinking human beings.
The only downside I see for President Obama is that it’s doubtful he can match the excitement created by Big Bill. But I could be wrong.
If you are watching, feel free to comment.
* Anyone catching the salute to veterans? I’m betting Mittens is kicking himself for overlooking the veterans.
* Now they’ve got a nun. This is covering the bases.
* Crowd is getting fired up for Sandra Fluke.
I have to say the Dems have not been shy about voicing support for abortion and reproductive rights.
*Elizabeth Warren onstage now.
*Shout out to Teddy Roosevelt. Yay!
*It’s the Big Dog.
Republicans have been in power for 28 years of the past 52, Democrats 24 years. “So what’s the job score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42.”
“Politics does not have to be a blood sport.”
If the righties were hoping that Bill undermined the President in this speech, they’re very disappointed now.
Talk about a love fest. Wow.
President Obama, 4.5 million jobs. Congressional Republicans, zero.
*Arithmetic!
The Big Dog did not disappoint. This was a brilliant speech, and I hope a lot of people watched.
Lots of good stuff to read on the Web today. First, Best Headline award to Paul Krugman — “Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Bipartisan.” He was referring to pundits who had fallen for Paul Ryan’s packaging as a courageous, honest, serious, and even wonky intellectual. Apparently some scales have fallen from some eyes.
Speaking of bipartisanship, here’s more proof that the practice of “fact checking” is dying on a bipartisan vine. Last night Mayor Castro said that 4.5 million jobs had been created on President Obama’s watch. (I am pretty certain he said “private sector jobs,” although that’s not in the official transcript. Maybe someone could check that.) Well, the fact-checkers at CNN confirmed that this number is correct — 4.5 million private sector jobs have been added to the economy since January 2010, when the recession hit bottom — but they downgrade the statement anyway. Why? Because (a) the economy lost a million public sector jobs; and (b) you have to subtract the number of jobs lost from January 2009 to January 2010, when the economy was still in free-fall.
So, CNN says, the Obama Administration has seen a net gain of only 300,000 private sector jobs, and when you add in the public sector jobs lost — many of which were lost because Republican governors were “balancing budgets” to make room for tax cuts — you end up with a negative number.
And I cordially invite CNN to fact check my ass. If anything, CNN’s argument makes the Democrats’ point, that the Bush economic crisis was so terrible it took a whole year just to stop the hemorrhage. And we wouldn’t have lost so many public sector jobs had Republicans not cut aid to states out of the stimulus, and see above about the Republican governors. How many jobs did Scott Walker alone lose?
See also Brian Beutler, “The Truth Behind The GOP Claim That Obama Hasn’t Created A Single Net Job.”
Do read Lincoln Mitchell, “Hey You Kids, Get Off of the Republican Party’s Lawn.” A sample:
Eastwood’s speech reveals a lot about today’s Republican Party. First, the fact that he was up on that podium in the first place raises questions about the professionalism and judgment of the operatives and strategists who planned the convention. Apparently, none of the people charged with making sure the convention presented the party and the candidate in the best light possible thought it was worth it to vet Eastwood’s speech or to find out whether the octogenarian actor was up to the task of giving a speech at the convention. This is the kind of mistake that serious presidential campaign teams do not make, but today’s Republican Party is rapidly losing its claim to being a serious or professional operation.
(In Eastwood’s defense, sorta kinda, I have to say that he is first and foremost an entertainer, and he was giving the audience in front of him exactly what they wanted.)
Likewise, much of the reaction from the Right to last night’s Dem convention was just weird. I see little attempt at substantive criticism; they are mostly picking out things like taking “God” out of the platform (thank you, Dems). They also went ballistic over a line from a video shown in Charlotte, “Government Is The Only Thing We All Belong To.” See Steve M for details.
Finally, don’t miss Nate Silver, “Sept. 4: The Simple Case for Why Obama Is the Favorite.”