Oct 30 2012

Obama’s Firewall A Sad PR Myth

Published by at 4:31 pm under 2012 Elections,All General Discussions

The reality of the last 4 years of the Obama administration is starting to come crashing down on the left wing echo chambers in DC, NY and San Francisco. Obama’s firewall of swing states is folding like a domino set made of cheap lawn chairs. It is so bad warning signs are flaring up in Pennsylvania, Minnesota and now even Oregon.

Let’s begin in Oregon with another case of Obama holding a big lead, but sitting right at the sure to lose level of support (47%):

Barack Obama won the West Coast state in a Pacific breeze four years ago, 57/41, but today can’t get above 47%with just seven days to go:It shows Obama leading Romney 47 percent to 41 percent, with 8 percent undecided. Three percent of voters said they would vote for someone else and 1 percent said they would not vote in the race.
When an incumbent Democrat can’t get to 50% in a deeply blue state like Oregon, that’s a bad sign.

A sitting President stuck below 50% one week out is really bad. I can’t over state how bad this is. The MoE on this poll is 5%, so it could be misleading, but if Obama is sinking in Oregon, he is heading towards a big loss come next week.

The other shocker poll out this week was from Gallup which showed Governor Romney blowing President Obama away in early voting: 52-46%. Ground game get-out-the-vote (GOTV) was supposed to bolster the Presidents firewall. It is not working,

Another sign of trouble is in Pennsylvania, where Romney is making in roads and team Obama is playing the boy trying to plug holes in the dike:

Not only has Minnesota has been moved to “Lean Dem” and the Obama Campaign is  up in that state with a significant television buy, but the Chicago gurus have  heeded Governor Rendell’s plea and are buying television in Pennsylvania and sending the Vice-President in to help prop up their flagging campaign.

With one week to go, and 96% of the vote on the table on Election Day in Pennsylvania, this expansion of the electoral map demonstrates that Governor Romney’s momentum has jumped containment from the usual target states and has spread to deeper blue states that Chicago never anticipated defending.

Just amazing. As I said way back before the polls turned, there was a very strong and silent Tea Party Libertarian backlash coming this election cycle. The 2010 insurgent voter was not satiated during the last congress. Far from it. People are fed up with Democrat government-only solutions that screw up so badly they make things ten times worse than they would have been if left alone (reference: Obama’s mountain of generational debt ON TOP OF our crippled economy, lost jobs and vaporized wealth).

Pollsters are only able to get something like 10% of the electorate to respond to polls. So it is not surprising the error bars on this election cycle are enormous. I think the Political Industrial Complex is going to be shocked come November 7th. This is not a pro Romney, pro GOP election. Which is why the polls are not registering the intensity of the wave coming to DC.

Update: I like this analysis over at RCP to a point.

A wave election is something you can generally see coming, rising above the surface, crushing everything in its path. But an undertow election isn’t something you can see. It pulls underneath the surface with sudden strength, sucking away a base of support thought to be reliable, the ground evaporating underneath you as you claw to stay afloat. It’s maddening for campaigns when voters you had counted as baked in to your models decide they have something better to do on Tuesday. Bush experienced this because of a news story. The Obama campaign may be experiencing something similar now – which may explain their strategic flailing over the past few weeks.

OK – wave or undertow I am not sure I see a distinction, except that the pollsters and the political class are living in another dimension, one  created out of the bubble that is the beltway mind think. The point is, the polls are all over the place because the models cannot represent what is happening because elections like this don’t happen but once a century.

3 responses so far

3 Responses to “Obama’s Firewall A Sad PR Myth”

  1. Mike M. says:

    I just worry about the effects of Hurricane Sandy on the election. It gives Obama a chance to look Presidential…and moves the Libya disaster off the front page.

  2. Fai Mao says:

    I think the difference between a wave and an under tow is that you can’t see the undertow

    I do not think that demonrats really know how unpopular they are. If they did they’d not be so snarky and vile in the way they talk to conservatives.