In general, my advice to the candidates as they prepare for tonight’s debate is to avoid getting all wound up in their consultants’ data about whom they need to pander to or how they need to behave. But, if I were President Obama, I would mention that Mitt Romney is a Republican a lot because the Republican brand is as popular as dog food. Only 11% of self-described moderates have a strongly-positive view of the Republican Party. Only 11% of Reagan-Democrats have a positive view of the Republican Party. If no one likes Mitt Romney, that is three-fold true for the party he represents.
When I look at just how unpopular the Republican Party has become, and I consider how strong the party is in large swaths of the country, it is no wonder that Obama is leading in the swing-states. We’re seeing this unpopularity reflected in a variety of ways. Recent polling data has shown Obama doing surprisingly well with blue-collar white women. He’s surging with Latinos. Now we see that Reagan-Democrats have turned against the GOP. Self-described moderates hate the GOP. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Romney is suffering from the fact that his support is not well distributed throughout the country. His support is strong in about 20 states, but many of those states have very small populations and, collectively, they don’t get him close to winning the Electoral College. That’s why a three-point difference in the popular vote is misleading.
This is the reverse of the normal trend in American elections. Democrats tend to be concentrated in urban centers and their inner suburbs, which makes it hard for them to win control of the House of Representatives, for example, because they have too many districts where they win 80 or 90 percent of the vote. If you allocated House seats by the overall vote in Philly and its suburbs, the Democrats would get six seats and the Republicans none. But, right now, the split is three to three. For Romney, however, it doesn’t do him much good to be rolling up big margins in Utah and Texas and Louisiana because he needs those votes in Florida, Ohio, and Virginia.
Back in the late 1980’s the Republicans made a concerted effort to turn “liberal” into a bad word. It worked so well that liberals decided to call themselves progressives instead. It’s time to turn “Republicans” into a bad word. Most people hate them already, so why not confirm their preexisting bias?
