UGA Campaign Discussion Group – September 26, 2012

Today’s first question was – Is the election over? Our general conclusion was that it is not over, but with differing degrees severity, we concluded that the Mitt Romney campaign is in trouble. Since last week, RCP has put Wisconsin and Ohio in the Obama electoral vote bringing him to within five votes of 270 to win. Obama opened his head-to-head lead by 1.0% back to the 3.7 % lead in the national polls he had just before Ryan was announced as Romney’s VP pick. The biggest movement again this week was Intrade which swung to Obama by another 12.7 points (74.1 to 26.0). Possible game-changers include a blowup in Libya (it is now becoming more apparent that it was a planned terrorist attack and not a spontaneous demonstration  to a movie insulting Islam), an economic collapse in Europe, a decisive Romney victory in the debates or unspeakable abuse of the Ohio State mascot by Obama. Nate Silver (http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/the-statistical-state-of-the-presidential-race/) has noted that only Thomas Dewey led the polls at the end of September and still lost the popular vote. Only Dewey and Al Gore led the polls at the end of September and lost the Electoral College. Naysayers point out that the only polling group to take the pulse in all those elections was Gallup which currently has Obama up by 6% in the tracking poll but had it even five days ago. Romney is now behind in all of the swing states including NC (MO is listed as Romney’s) by RCP. If Romney starts getting in trouble in AZ (RCP currently has it 8.5% for Romney with the latest poll only 3% but there have been only three polls in the state since the end of July), it will show he is in real trouble. The most likely reasons for the Obama lead at this point is that Romney is not a very good candidate and that the public likes Obama more than it likes Romney. The other point here is just how many undecided voters are really out there. If the polls are to be believed, Romney needs a large pool of undecided voters to turn it around.

Some other interesting stories of the week included Romney leading the Romney/ Ryan cheer which must have gone over better in person than on TV; the excellent speech Romney gave at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting; and the Ryan reception at AARP.  We had a discussion on the current Romney strategy to win the news cycle each day, but we did not agree on the wisdom of it. One view holds that he must win each day until the first debate to stop the bleeding.  The alternate view holds that any day the prominent Republican sound bite(s) are not about jobs and the economy is a day that favors the Democrats.  The first debate will be in one week. Romney needs to more than meet expectations next week to move the needle. Obama will have a higher level of expectations, but he only needs to meet them. Romney will be trying to annoy Obama while Obama will try to get Romney off script.

The book of the week is Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 which shows us moving to a split society with intellectual elites doing well and the working class sinking. We also had a discussion of the differences in corporate taxes in the USA and the rest of the world. Bill Clinton was quoted that when he raised the corporate rate it was pegged at the midpoint of industrialized nations. Since many countries have lowered their corporate rates, Clinton thinks we should lower those rates.