Why Obama Will Lose To Romney

Monty Pelerin / EconomicNoise.com

This post is from two years ago (September 29, 2010). It represents my view of Obama then and what would happen in the mid-term elections (then about 5 weeks away). In the last two years Obama’s record has only become more dismal and his character flaws and ethics have been revealed. Virtually everything he has touched has been a failure (although he claims successes, still believing his words are more important than our eyes or the actual data).
Two years later we are again about five weeks away from an election. The media and the pollsters would have you believe that Obama has a lock on being re-elected. The public knew much less about Obama then than they do now. It is incredible to me that pollsters are publishing (with a straight and serious face) the numbers they are. Look for these pollsters to move toward reality as the election nears, not because they will have a clearer vision but because they will eventually be judged in terms of their accuracy during the few weeks preceding the election (especially their last polls). These last polls are their samples for future business. They will change because they value future business more than Obama’s re-election.
There may be a closure effect in the media as well, although it will be less easy to spot. The media publishes qualitative rather than quantitative substance, which somewhat protects them from the clear-cut conclusions that can be drawn against quantitative data. Many media people seem immune to shame and unconcerned about their reputations. The alternative hypothesis of stupidity is also a possibility. Living in their own world, their errors are reinforced by fellow thinkers.
Nevertheless, some members of the media will realize what is coming and abandon their positions rather than go down with the Obama ship. Watch them in the last two weeks preceding the election to see the hedging and perhaps a Road to Damascus conversion or two.

 

Regardless of how the pollsters and media react, I have no basis to change what was written two years ago. If anything, matters have gotten worse for the Democrats and Obama. Obama’s “magic” is gone. Those who were infatuated by him four years ago are disappointed, disillusioned and possibly angry. Many of them will not vote for him again.
Blacks are disillusioned as their “Great Black Hope” has made their lives more, not less, miserable. They will turn out in smaller numbers this time. College students who came out in droves to vote for the rock star are now jobless, living at home with their parents. They too will turn out in smaller numbers and some who turn out will switch sides. The same can be said about most other identifiable groups.
I cannot think of one sub-group that Obama might benefit from. Perhaps his support from Hispanics will increase, but I am unsure about that. Whether they do or not, it is difficult to imagine Obama doing anywhere close to what he achieved in 2008. As I have written elsewhere, his biggest advantage of 2008 — people did not know him and could imagine him to be whatever they were looking for — is gone. Now his biggest liability is that too many people know him!
Romney is not the best candidate in this American Idol World of politics. Competency and success seem not to be honored by the electorate. Nevertheless, the bulk of Americans are looking to dump the current albatross and many others need only the slightest excuse to do so. If Romney does not blow it in the debates, I think 2010 will be another huge surprise and embarrassment for Dems and their public relations specialists (otherwise known as the media and most pollsters).

Hill Poll: Americans Feel That Polls Are Skewed Towards Obama

Justin Sink - A plurality of Americans and more than seven in 10 Republicans believe pollsters are intentionally skewing results to benefit President Obama, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

Some 42 percent of voters surveyed by Daily Kos and SEIU said pollsters were manipulating their sample sizes to benefit the incumbent president, while 40 percent do not. An additional 18 percent said they were not sure. That's evidence that Republican claims that Democrats and minority voters are being oversampled in national polls could be resonating — and potentially undermining the momentum of the president's early lead.

Some Republicans — most prominently among them strategist Dick Morris — began questioning the sampling of some polls last week when surveys showed President Obama opening up a sizable lead in swing states, including Ohio and Florida. Republicans have charged that the polls oversample minority voters, while polling firms say the sampling percentages reflect the electorate's changing demographics.

But Republicans are particularly likely to believe that the polls are unfair, reporting by a 71-13 percent that polls are biased against their candidate. Members of the Tea Party suspect intentional skewing by a remarkable 84-5 percent margin.

Independents are less likely to believe polls have been intentionally manipulated, with 45 percent of respondents saying they see deliberate tampering with the results. Four in 10 independents say they believe the polls are accurate.

Democrats do not feel as passionately as their Republican counterparts about the validity of the polls. Of the Democrats surveyed, 65 percent said pollsters are not tampering with the results, versus 14 percent of Democrats who believe their candidate is earning an advantage.

History Shows That President Obama Will Win Re-Election

Vern McKinley - Mitt Romney is hoping that he can defeat President Barack Obama by focusing on the weak economy. But can he? For the answer, we need to examine the linkage between economic cycles and election cycles.
A recession is a period of diminishing economic activity, a concept that tracks broad trends in the economy. These trends are what most Americans will be looking at when they vote in November.
Historically, it has taken a recession in the two-year window before a presidential election for a challenger to knock off a sitting president. Data on recessions from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) integrated with the relevant election results gives us the following summary of sitting presidents unceremoniously removed from office over the past century:
George H.W. Bush got the boot in 1992 after the recession of 1990-1991. Jimmy Carter got the boot in 1980 after the recession of early 1980. Gerald Ford got the boot in 1976 after the recession of 1973-1975. Herbert Hoover got the boot in 1932 after the recession that started in 1929 and ran to the election. William Howard Taft got the boot in 1912 after the recession of 1910-1912.
Going back even further, Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland were both removed from office after recessions in the two-year window before their elections. In fact, this formulation holds for every case of a deposed incumbent going back to the 1850s, which is as far back as NBER’s data goes.
However, the most recent recession ended more than three years ago, outside the two-year window. And since there are no definitive signs we are currently in a recession, the prospects look quite good for the president. Like re-election winners such as George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt before him — other incumbents who saw downturns early in their first terms — he is benefiting from a bounce-back late in his term. The inflection point between winners and losers appears to be around two years before re-election.
Republicans could argue that this has been a pitiful recovery and that it stacks up poorly against the Reagan-era recovery of the early 1980s, which followed a similarly deep recession with unemployment peaking in the double digits. That is all true, but foremost in most people’s memories is not the Reagan recovery of 30 years ago but the recession that started under Bush in late 2007 and which consumed the last presidential campaign in 2008.

The reality that the current weak economy looks good in comparison only emphasizes the deep hole of late 2008. Bush left office in the midst of a financial collapse, panic-induced bailouts and deep debt used to finance, among other things, unpaid-for wars.
Republicans could argue that 8 percent unemployment is a lethal level for an incumbent to defend. That is also true, but the same thing was said when Reagan was running in 1984 with unemployment above 7 percent and Roosevelt was running in 1936 with unemployment well into the double digits. Both Reagan and Roosevelt won decisive landslides while losing a miniscule number of states.
These examples suggest that what matters to voters is the general trend of the economy at the time of the election, as opposed to the precise level of unemployment.
Republicans could argue that the forecasts of the positive effects of the 2009 stimulus were wildly overstated by the Obama administration and thus the administration’s policies failed according to its own benchmarks. After all, the economic brain trust in the administration said that if the stimulus was passed, unemployment would be below 6 percent by now.
True again, but most voters are not aware of just how wrong the Obama economists were. In any case, every White House puts out rosy forecasts.
Based on the historical record, and despite all arguments against the performance of Obamanomics, it looks like the recovery has been strong enough to give the president four more years.