If it’s a contest between winning a debate and having a good jobs report, it’s no contest. No one cares about jobs reports. Ultimately, I don’t think Romney will benefit a whole lot from his debate performance. Elements of his debate performance will haunt him the rest of the way. But he did one very important thing. He prevented a total stampede of his candidacy that would have imperiled the Republicans’ control of the House and likely resulted in a rout in the Senate races. Another way of putting this is that Romney is still going to get his ass handed to him in the election, but the Republican Party will benefit from his debate performance because he stopped the bleeding.
Before the debate, I thought it was likely that the Dems would pick up at least two and perhaps as many as four Senate seats, and that they would easily retake the House. Now, I think we may net one Senate seat and probably won’t retake the House. But things are fluid. They have tightened up, but most of the momentum is still pushing against the GOP. One good reason to get involved personally at the local level is that the shape of the final result will have a massive impact on what the Democrats are able to do over the next two years. So, go out and find a campaign to work on over the next five weeks.
Was it a good jobs report?
With only 114,000 new net jobs added?
Really?
The “establishment” survey, which is much more stable and less erratic than the household survey, is not promising. The household survey, prone to wild swings, showed the biggest increase in employment in 30 years!
What if it swings back on Friday, November 2nd?
It won’t matter because most of the votes will already have been cast, and no one gives a shit about jobs reports.
Takes a couple days for the UE report to have an effect. Election will be over.
More food for thought, while recovering from the “shellacking” South Carolina put on the Georgia Bulldogs, home of the nutty professor referenced earlier…
Voters impressions of the economy are, typically, already settled at this point. Voter impression of the incumbent are settled. Isn’t the only variable not set is voter impression of the challenger?
Debates don’t matter?
Their effect is extremely minor. No Obama partisan is going to change their attitude toward Obama.
I think you may be freaking out a little too much. It’s still Mitt Romney, which means he has plenty of time to turn his supporters off and get the media to start openly calling his campaign clowns again before election day.
I’m not ready to live in a world where the dickish robot man is able to string together multiple weeks of sustained competence.
Yes, plus the fact that this single win will start to make some Republicans absurdly overconfident even though the underlying structure of the race has not changed.
You are also discounting the potential of the remaining debates to changes the momentum again. That is a 3-round fight remember?
This is the big, final spook. But Romney’s big win is like blowing hot air into a popped balloon.
I’m with you, B. Joe. Romney hasn’t had a solid week of competence since the campaign began, and he’s not suddenly going to be consistently competent because of one night’s performance. And that’s all the debate was: a performance. And the higher he thinks he’s flown after last week, the harder the fall.
Boo-yah.
sweet. more emo white liberal whining about Obama.
while mitt stands there and lies.
glad to see you keep your eye on what’s important.
Okay, I just have a few issues about things I’ve read after this debate and jobs report. This was not the greatest “debate performance” in American history by Romney. It was not the worst by Obama. I’ve gotten the impression from this event that Romney was a combination of Lincoln, Reagan, and Jack Kennedy and Obama was a Stockdale/Quayle amalgamation. It’s getting kinda weird. Another thing is that, beforehand, debates don’t matter in the final analysis. Well, now it seems like they’re everything after this one magical performance. What the hell? As far as these job reports are concerned, I’ve trained my eye on them all year hoping that the unemployment number goes down and hearing that nobody gets re-elected if the number is here or there. Reading that Reagan and Clinton got re-elected because this mystical number went down. Well, it finally goes down and I find out that it doesn’t mean shit. Huh? I am not a wonk or a very sophisticated pundit-type but this is getting kinda confusing.
Pretty sure Florida-26 will be sending a new dem to the House, Joe Garcia.
::
Unfortunately, that gain is probably going to be counterbalanced by the loss of John Tierney from the Massachusetts delegation.
Nah — have faith. Massachusetts has been electing crooked Dems for a century. Three straight Suffolk County sheriffs wound up in their own pokey at one point, fer gawds sake. Tierney’s only slightly crooked. He’ll pass.
Call me a Pollyanna, but even assuming Romney has managed to stanch the bleeding a bit, there’s no reason to assume he won’t immediately do something to rip the bandage and the stitches out and start it back up again.
Plus, having had some time to reflect and re-watch the debate, I’m fairly certain that PBHO held himself back deliberately, and it wasn’t just a strategy of playing it safe.
And the more I hear arguments about altitude sickness and fear of the Angry Black Man label, and he was distracted with other things, etc, the more condescending it sounds, however well-intentioned.
Whatever you may think of the President, he’s more than proven that he can perform under adversity, and walk and chew gum at the same. He may make miscalculations here and there, but he’s in charge of his game.
Is this the same Booman who has been bragging about his predictive track record and who has been predicting an Obama blow-out by a margin bigger than 2008?
Dude, I don’t agree with you on a lot of stuff but I’m with the other posters above – you’re overreacting. Is that all it takes for you to give up the predictive position you’ve been taking for the last year – often in spite of all polling evidence at the time? Remember your main theme: that Romney is a horrible candidate. Did one debate performance, much like all his others over the past year, change that?
Or was it that you now no longer see Obama as the great campaigner that you saw him as?
In any event, buck up. All the baseball pundits had your NY Bankees folding due to age, etc. a month ago and all they did was lock up the #1 seed.
yes, my prediction was predicated on Romney continuing on the trajectory he was on. Right now, he is not going to get blown out. As of today, he actually is back in the game. His chances of winning outright are slim, but he is not going to get completely crushed. And the debate is the only reason why. But things are fluid.
“But things are fluid” is the key.
Gimme a break, Boo.
This is fucking ROMNEY we’re talking about. the man can’t put together 3 good days in a row.
Even I, knee-jerk liberal, bleeding heart, stoned, tree-hugging puppy lover am in better spirits than you. Mostly BECAUSE of you.
The RH.hold12 contract has never traded below $0.50 on the IEM this year. It bottomed in June.
A week ago I would have said you were far too optimistic about the Democrats chances and now I think you’ve swung too far in the opposite direction. This election isn’t going to be decided by a 90-minute debate.
I expect it to be a good year for Democrats. I expect that Obama will win, Harry Reid will remain Senate leader and Nancy Pelosi has a small but viable chance at taking back the speaker’s gavel. But I don’t think that any of those things are guaranteed.
I didn’t think so before the debate, either.
Oh, what bullshit!!!
“But things are fluid!!!???”
Of fucking course they’re “fluid”!!! All kinds of things can happen during a campaign. The function of the media is to channel that fluidity into a course that is desired by the controllers. It’s a control mechanism, duh.
As I wrote a scant three days ago…and as I have been saying since Ron Paul was very effectively non-personed by the media months ago during the RatPub debates:
Like I said:
Like you said:
So who the fuck is the master prognosticator” now, Booman? This scam is going just exactly as i have said it will go. No landslides, just “Four more years” for the present quite obedient PermaGov frontman. Why changes horses in mid-scam? But also…why give that horse carte blanche to go in whatever direction he might desire?
Here’s my own
progmasturbation….errr, ehhh, sorry…prognostication.Four more years for O’Bomber and a split federal legislature. Cain’t trust them RatPublicans, neither.
Bet on it.
AG
I’d quibble with your title and say things didn’t get more real, they got more fake as we take another step toward a post-truth society, but I take your point. I think Obama wasn’t expecting and so wasn’t prepared for a particular barrage of lies where he’d find himself attacked from the left. In that respect, Romney delivered a kind of sucker punch that left Obama off balance all night.
I’ve actually been more disappointed in the campaign’s response to the debate than to the performance itself. The campaign hasn’t been able to take back control of its message; it hasn’t developed a new line on Romney nor returned successfully to older lines (eg, his taxes); it even got the job numbers stepped on, spending most of Friday defending the integrity of the BLS.
On the opinion front, most of the left bloggers spent days ragging on the President’s performance rather than taking the fight back to Romney. The Democratic pollsters didn’t have a sufficient number of polls in the field to counter the rush of right wing tripe that is being generated by Republican pollsters (the sheer number of RW polls that came out starting Thursday suggests a deliberate strategy to bolster Romney’s performance in the debate whatever the actual performance). In general, our side has just seemed completely outmaneuvered the past week, something we haven’t seen since the 2010 election.