Pew Research Center is just one polling outfit, and a bit of a pro-Obama outlier, at that. But, according to their research, Mitt Romney is the only candidate from either party to have a net-negative favorability rating in September in any election going back to at least 1988. As a cautionary tale, however, the last time the Democrat had a comparable advantage in favorability in September was in 2000, and we know how that turned out. Al Gore managed to squander his likability in the debates, and the election grew close enough to steal.
That’s probably Romney’s only hope in this situation, but he’s starting from a worse position than George W. Bush, and these numbers were compiled before the 47 percent controversy erupted.
Romney has many problems that George W. Bush didn’t share, including a party that is scurrying away from him like his name were Todd Akin. On the other hand, Romney is a more accomplished debater than George W. Bush, so he can hold out hope to do well in the debates on his own merits, rather than just dreaming that Obama sighs and rolls his eyes a lot.
The Republicans go about winning elections quite a bit differently than the Democrats. They don’t rely so much on a ground game and field offices. When Obama and Biden go into a community and hold a rally, they mine for names and organizers, and that’s really the main benefit of the event. Romney should be doing the same thing, but he’s spending as much time fundraising as he is holding events, and that could be in part because he gets no benefit from campaign events. If people don’t like you, appearing in their community doesn’t help. Still, attracting at least modestly-sized crowds should help a campaign identify enthusiastic voters who will be willing to work for the campaign, and it also helps you tighten up your voter-contact lists since you can cross-off a bunch of names that you now know will be voting for you without any nudges.
As far as I can tell, Romney’s strategy has been to load up on cash and deluge the airwaves with ads at the end of the campaign. I don’t really think he’s been forced into this strategy, either. It seems to have been the plan all along. It’s definitely a hail-mary strategy. It doesn’t invest people in the campaign. It doesn’t build a grassroots organization. It annoys people who are exposed to way too much political advertising. And it doesn’t work very well when you’ve allowed the key messenger, the candidate, to be discredited in the interim. Not only do people not like Mitt Romney, they don’t believe him. Amazingly, Bill Clinton now has a near-infinite advantage over Romney in credibility.
The Republicans’ big money advantage concerns me a lot when it comes to Senate and House races, but it causes me no heartburn in the presidential race. At this point, I pretty much want Romney to run ads because I think they’ll probably work against him.
