When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might seem to have been news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t. “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News Channel was the first major television program to report this incident. Yet this story is not just a Norfolk story, either in what happened or in how the media and the authorities have tried to sweep it under the rug.
In a long election season, it’s never wise to get too high or too low over any one poll. Presidential elections are won at the state level, but statewide polling is fairly sporadic at this stage of the race, so we’re stuck reading national polls a lot. But the latest poll is bad news for President Obama. We all know the major issues by now to look for with individual polls: some polls are adults, and are totally useless, because only registered voters can vote. Polls of likely voters, in turn, are vastly more accurate and less Democratic-biased than polls of registered voters, many of whom also don’t show up to vote. Most polls are also reported after weighting to achieve some guesstimate of the partisan breakdown of the general electorate among Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Even polls that don’t feature egregious hackery are an inexact science, because they rest on the pollster’s current assumptions about the D/R/I split and the ‘screen’ they use to decide who is a likely voter. If the shape of the electorate is not as projected, the poll will be wrong. Polling averages tend to be steadier than individual polls conducted over a few hundred respondents, and they show a tight race – the RealClearPolitics average shows Obama up 46.5%-45.1% , while the left-leaning TPMPolltracker average shows Romney up 46.1-44.2 . Those averages smooth out possible outliers like last Friday’s jaw-dropping Rasmussen poll showing Romney up 50-43 among likely voters. And the averages themselves get more reliable as more of the pollsters start polling likely voters – right now, Rasmussen is virtually the only pollster reporting regularly conducted polls that is polling likely rather than registered voters. Looking at RCP, Rasmussen’s mid-April poll is the last likely voter poll showing President Obama in the lead. All that said, the Obama campaign cannot be happy with the results of the latest CBS/New York Times poll – a poll of registered voters done by two organizations notoriously unfriendly to Republicans* – showing Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama 46-43. Some breakdowns below the fold. 1. This is a registered voter poll, which as noted above means it tends to favor Democrats. The weighted party-ID split is 36% D, 30% R, 34% I. 2. The trend is negative for Obama – 48-42 lead in February, 47-44 in March, tied 46-46 in April, down 43-46 in May. Whatever the methodology, if you use it consistently and show a clear trend, that says something. 3. Gender gap? Romney leads 45-42 among men, actually down from a 49-43 lead last month, but after all the “war on women” hoo-ha, Obama’s 49-43 lead among women has flipped to a 46-44 Romney lead. 4. Oddly, Obama for once is polling behind his approval rating, which is up to 50% in this poll. One of the common themes of the past few years is that he tends to poll above his approval rating – people tend to like him or say they do, but don’t think he’s getting the job done. This, compared to the general personal and political unlikeability of Mitt Romney, is one reason why I tend to agree with Michael Barone’s third scenario that there’s a good chance that undecided voters wait until the last minute to resign themselves and break for Romney , much as happened in the primaries among reluctant voters who felt they had run out of better options. The poll dropped some of the questions in last month’s survey about Romney, but that poll had him tied even though voters said by 60-34 that they can’t relate to him and by 62-27 that he says what people want to hear, not what he believes. In other words, it’s only Romney’s inherent flaws as a candidate that are even keeping this race close – people neither especially like nor trust Romney but are still dissatisfied enough with Obama to give him a shot. The longer the polls look tied, the worse things get for Obama, because it means voters haven’t bought his various efforts to make Romney radioactive. Remember, all this occurs against a backdrop of voters unhappy with the direction of the country and thus predisposed to change horses. 5. Despite its near-unanimous popularity among the media, entertainment and academia, Obama’s support of same-sex marriage is not an asset; by 25-16 (22-14 among independents), more voters say they are less likely rather than more likely to vote for Obama after his change of position on the issue, whereas by 23-17 (20-20 among independents), voters say they are more likely to vote for Romney as a result. Just under 60% of voters don’t consider the issue a factor. Notably, the poll found that the public, by 50-46 (50-47 among independents) favors amending the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Meanwhile, by 67-24, voters think Obama’s change of position on the issue is politically expedient rather than principled. In other words, the voters think he’s being political and doing something unpopular. This is not where you want to be in an election. Yet another reason why I refer to Romney-Obama as the collision between a resistible force and a movable object. 6. 62% of voters named the economy as the number one issue and another 20% named the budget, the deficit or health care. This race will be dominated by the big-picture domestic issues, not foreign policy or social issues, as much influence as those have on the baked-in partisan divides. * – The National Journal has some thoughts on the oddities of the CBS/NYT poll’s methodology . POSTSCRIPT: Bad polling news for Obama is also bad for his campaign for another, more immediate reason. Both of these candidates are unusually dependent on raising vast sums of money. Obama, as a number of press accounts recently have noted, has mostly lost the confidence of Wall Street fundraisers, who were a huge element of his fundraising in 2012. Romney, by contrast, as a former private equity guy, has a natural base of support throughout the financial industry. But many potential donors are terrified of donating to Romney and seeing Obama win, given this White House’s well-known efforts to target and intimidate private citizens who donate to the opposition. Perceptions shifting away from an inevitable Obama victory could have a disproportionate effect on the fundraising balance of power.
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CBS/NYT: Romney 46, Obama 43 Among Registered Voters
Pennsylvania’s going to be an interesting place this November: incumbent Senator Bob Casey is in the unenviable position of having to explain to half of his constituents why he’s not really like President Obama, while explaining to the other half why Bob Casey actually is . If you’re wondering how Senator Casey plans to square that circle; the plan is to ensure that he does not. Along those lines RedState talked last week with Tom Smith, who won the Republican nomination for Senate. Tom is a businessman with a history in the coal industry – you know, the industry that Democrats hate – and we talked about both that, and the race generally: Tom’s site is here . Moe Lane ( crosspost )
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RS Interview: Tom Smith (R CAND, PA-SEN).
It’s funny, really. Somebody like Mark Halperin sees this : Barack Obama’s decision to base his re-election campaign outside of Washington seems to be working pretty darn well. The campaign’s massive, high-rise headquarters in Chicago’s Loop achieves a fine balance between 2008’s hip-casual dorm room (there’s a Ping-Pong table and cheeky homemade signage) and 2012’s systematized Death Star (there are more employees than I have ever seen in a political campaign, with work stations subdivided as ever more employees are added). The place hums from early morning until late at night, designed for maximum efficiency and manifest focus. and thinks “Success!” I see it and think “High burn rate.” Also: “Hubris.” Let’s talk about why. Visualization of the Electoral College totals will be helpful, so I’m going to show a series of maps (via 270toWin ) and give my explanation of what I think each one represents. A lot of this is subjective, so if you think that I’m generally full of it anyway you have my permission to keep thinking that. Anyway, let’s start with the baseline: These are the 2008 results, adjusted for Electoral College changes (which cost the Democrats 6 Electoral Votes (EVs) right there). This is the ceiling for Barack Obama. I know that they claim that Arizona is in play for them, but I suspect that even Team Obama’s leadership sees that as a morale-keeping exercise. So… 359 EVs. Good number, right? 89 EV margin. And yes, it was… and then the administration started to, well, govern. This is Fallback Map #1: It shows Indiana switching sides – which pretty much everybody in the business has already conceded – Nebraska going fully Republican, and both North Carolina and Florida becoming toss-ups. This is a map that obviously Team Obama would like to see being the reality on the ground in September of 2012… and, indeed, it was probably the reality on the ground in September… of 2010. I’m showing this map partially because I do think that it was expected by the Democrats that this would effectively be their 2012 map, and partially because it bears noting just how volatile a lead of 89 EVs can be. This is the Fallback #2 map: And this is the map that should be front and center at the Democratic party’s HQ right now, because it should alarm the heck out of them. With NC flipped (and the NC Democratic party is in freefall right now), and IA, NH, & OH added to FL as the states in play the Democratic margin is down to 6 EVs. Which is to say, the 89 EV lead that formerly existed has been reduced by over 90% at this point. This should not fill the Democrats with confidence, given that there’s this map: This is a representation of the last Cook Political Report snapshot ( May 10, 2012 ) of the race. Toss-up states are CO, IA, NV, OH, PA, & VA (note that NC & NH are conceded to the GOP). Now, obviously some of those states will go to the Democrats… but not all of them. And there aren’t that many combinations to make the numbers come out right. Here’s the best firewall that I could come up with on the Democrats’ behalf: …and even then it requires a Hail Mary play: write off OH, FL, & VA (all three of which have gone strongly for the GOP on the state level since 2008); retain CO, NV, & PA (that last one will be a bear, but they could do it). Also retain IA… and somehow suck two EVs out of NE. That keeps the EV at 270. A bare win. That is the Democratic firewall. That, to use a pop culture phrase, should be the Democratic party’s zombie plan. And here’s the thing: I don’t think that the kids overpopulating Central Obama Hive #1 in Chicago really understand this. I think that they’re still operating under the assumptions of the Baseline map, with the avant-garde feeling all transgressive by embracing the Fallback #1 map and the IT guys in the basement morbidly looking at a variant of Fallback #2. It has perhaps not occurred to them yet that there are implications to the way that Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia all went severely Republican in 2009 and 2010; or that the Virginia and North Carolina state Democratic parties both decided to shoot themselves in the head, just in time for the 2012 elections*. If it had sunk in, then their unofficial motto wouldn’t be “Be confident, but take nothing for granted.” It’d be “Hold the line! Make the [expletive deleted] fight for every inch.” Mind you, the fact that they haven’t a clue? Great news . Moe Lane ( crosspost ) PS: Some of you will probably now want to argue that Mitt Romney does not have a notably rosier electoral strategy at the current time. So noted, and I agree with you: both candidates have a hard row to hoe this election cycle. Fortunately: from what I’ve seen of and heard from the Romney campaign, they grimly understand this. Even more fortunately: from what I’ve seen from the Obama campaign, they do not . *Admittedly, Virginia’s Democratic party did this in 2009, which hides the symptoms a bit – but they haven’t exactly recovered from their statewide losses in 2009 and 2011, either. And that will make a difference when Obama tries to campaign there this year.
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Election 2012: The long, slow retreat of Obama for America.
The Mobile Press-Register had just about a perfect news story today with the latest on the Matthew Owens beating case about which I have written many times at this site, and which continues to earn national attention. Please read Brendan Kirby’s balanced, comprehensive new report right here . The police chief, Micheal Williams, disputed key elements of the narrative offered by Owens’ sister and other witnesses interviewed by the Press-Register. Contrary to reports that it was a mob-beating, the chief said investigators could only confirm that one person –
