Nate Silver’s analysis today is modestly encouraging despite the fact that we really ought to be talking not about who will win, but about how big Obama’s victory will be. The first debate changed the fundamentals of the race is a way that is hard to understand. Perhaps it was simply the sight of both men on a stage together that added to Romney’s standing as a candidate. If it were as simple as Romney having a better night, we would have seen more snap-back after Biden demolished Ryan and Obama humiliated Romney in the next two debates. What we saw, instead, was a halt to Romney’s momentum and a very modest move in the Democrats’ direction. It looks like things have stabilized with Obama holding enough of a lead in the truly key swing states to hold on to a narrow Electoral College victory.
My suspicion is that the most important thing Romney did in the first debate is bring home the support of his base, particularly in the South, where he was regarded with some skepticism until he spewed all their favorite talking point lies in the first debate. That helped Romney improve his standing in Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia, and it gave him a popular vote boost in the south more generally. But it didn’t do enough to move him into the lead in the key Midwestern states or in Colorado and Nevada.
The debate tonight appears, therefore, to present much greater risk to the president than to Romney. It doesn’t look like Obama can change the dynamics much by winning the debate unless Romney does something titanically stupid. But Romney has shown the ability to make leaps and bounds off a debate victory. Most of that is probably already baked in the cake, but I believe he has more potential upside than the president simply because he is less well known and opinions about him are more fluid.
However, there are some states that are close enough in the polls that any minor change can create a different outcome. Florida and Virginia are both states where that appears to be true, and I’d argue the same about New Hampshire, Iowa, and even North Carolina.
Tonight’s debate presents more risk for Obama, but his advantage is that, if nothing changes he is going to win.
I tend to think it’s merely the obvious downside to negative politicization and the artifact of a a white supremacist (in a clinical, descriptive sense) electorate.
Everybody made Romney into a boogeyman. The President defined him as a soulless corporate raider who will subvert any and all economic patriotism. The evangelicals called him an apostate cultist. The right wing called him a traitor and a fraud.
Everybody made him out to be so much bigger than he was. And in the end, he’s just some aloof rich prick who may or may not be a robot. Contrary to defining him as a new pathology, this country has a longstanding tradition of Mitt Romneys. A number of whom have absolutely been elected.
He’s also really, really white. That helps.
Here’s my prediction: the media and undecideds will consider it a “tie,” in that both will sound knowledgeable even if Romney is wrong on pretty much every issue, because no one will actually take the time to double-check the candidates’ answers. This debate is more a test for our worthless news media than for either Obama or Romney.
I also don’t think that it will move the needle one way or the other, for the simple reason that people who were “undecided” but were in all likelihood going to vote for Romney in the end perceived him as a credible enough alternative in the first two debates to make their decision. Obama just needs to show energy and to keep Romney from verbally walking all over him. If he does that, Romney will spend the last two weeks like an untethered astronaut slowly floating away from his ship, with no wat to change his trajectory.
I would make a slight correction. You say “no one will actually take the time to double-check the candidates’ answers.” Actually, they will. One of the small victories in the fight for actual journalism over the last few years is that major MSM organizations now print fact-checks subsequent to major debates and speeches.
Unfortunately, these fact checks still do not enter into their estimation of the candidates. It’s all a matter of style and appearance.
For example, the NY Times certainly fact-checked the Biden/Ryan debate. But in a ridiculous puff piece on Ryan by one Mark Leibovich published yesterday in the NY Times Magazine, there is a reference to “the debate in which Ryan would turn in a competent if somewhat innocuous performance that was largely overshadowed by Joe Biden’s amped-up mannerisms.”
That’s it. That’s the sum total of it as far as this “journalist” is concerned. (It was at that point that I stopped reading.)
But fact checks there were. And they have already determined, on the basis of Ryan’s convention speech and his debate performance, that he is a pathological liar.
Do you mean “ought to” as in “Obama’s still going to win it’s only a matter of how much” or “Romney/GOP is so bad Obama should be a lock but isn’t?”
Romney’s favourables at 49/44 are better than Obama’s 49/47…. What gives?
Has Obama’s attempt to define Romney negatively backfired, when what the American people really wanted was either a new face or an exciting new program for the next four years?
Romney has the obvious advantage of not having been president over the last four years.
And not being Black…
Well, clearly the Irish have decided who’s a more capable leader I always have liked the Irish!
Either that or it’s just tribal politics with the Irish backing one of their own (Barry O’Bama!).
Love the photo of Obama guzzling a Guinness. The rest of the country might want to have a beer with Bush, but I’d rather have a Guinness with O’bama.
Nah.
There is much more risk here for Romney. Just ask yourself this: what are the odds that Obama says something so stupid that it shows he lacks a rudimentary understanding of foreign affairs? Then ask the same thing about Romney.
In my view, there’s about a 33% chance that Romney will make a major error.
You right, but I think Booman’s point is that, the way things seem to be going, a major foreign policy error isn’t that much of a risk for Romney. Is that because anybody who actually cares about foreign policy errors is already for Obama?
You forget the voting public doesn’t have an elementary understanding of foreign affairs and in the past have shown a marked approval of Bush-like swaggering.
I agree with Booman’s analysis about the risks. So long as Obama stays awake and doesn’t get too into the weeds with his answers, he should do okay.
I think the outcome of this debate has alot to do with how Bob Schieffer handles the job of moderator. This is the sit-down format at a table, like the VP debate. Martha Raddatz did a great job keeping those two on track. I hope Schieffer gets an afternoon nap and is ready for this pair of personalities.
One thing I’ve noticed with Bob Schieffer over the years: He respects The Office of the Presidency, regardless of who’s occupying it. Call him old-fashioned that way. If Romney shows disrespect to The Office, he may get himself into some trouble. Romney probably already knows this but can he help himself?
I disagree in the sense that Romney’s posturing on foreign policy has been fundamentally irresponsible and dishonest. Biden destroyed Ryan on his war mongering. He made the clear point: the clear result of your positions is war. You want to go to war. That’s crazy talk. It didn’t make much impact because it was the VP debate. I think it will make an impact if that happens to Romney.
Bring out the war mongering basis of Romney’s foreign policy and make him own it. Don’t let him just babble about weakness or whatever. That won’t be good for him, because there is no appetite for another war in Asia.
The other theme of Biden-Ryan was “Afghan autonomy/self-direction” (Biden) vs “Afghan as client state/perm occupation” (Ryan). I hope that Obama continues this, and directly links the unfunded war to the deficits.
Plus, there’s Romney’s incredible inconsistency. He slammed Obama’s decision to go after bin Laden. Now he’s gearing up for war just as Iran has agreed to hold talks with the US on its nuclear program. I suppose Obama will back off from bringing up Romney’s pledge to have “no daylight” between Israel’s policies and America’s. In other words, he promises in advance to sacrifice US sovereignty to allow Israel to wag the dog whenever the whim, or domestic politics, demands it.
But you’re right: Romney is parroting Bush’s stupid swagger that got us into an unnecessary war that wrecked our economy and our standing in the world. That’s the issue, and Obama will profit if he hammers on the specter of returning to the disastrous comic-book Bush doctrine. He might also point out how many of Romney’s foreign affairs advisers are neocon leftovers from Bush. If he hits those point hard he will do much more than just stay even.
It’s more likely Romney that will bring that up in one way or another. I think Obama can handle it. Romney’s problem is that his knowledge of foreign policy consists of nothing more than a bunch of GOP talking points. Obama not only has the benefit of daily hands-on experience dealing with other countries, he is also much smarter about foreign policy than most American leaders, let alone Romney. As we saw with Biden/Ryan, Romney will push stupid Republican talking points and Obama will have ample opportunity to show just how stupid they are.
The poll shift after the first “debate” still evades all rational attempts to explain it. It was not some disaster, just Obama off his game, from a showbiz perspective. The real catalyst was not the debate itself, but the media’s flogging the meme that this was the game changer, the debacle for Obama, blablabla. Journalism of the very worst kind, designed not to present fact-based views, but to set off firestorms of hysteria and keep the drama live. And the yakkers on our side were among the worst of them (lookin at you, Chris and Ed).
Still, that doesn’t explain the apparently dramatic shift in the polls. I have to think the media hype exposed a soft fringe in Obama’s support. Maybe some of it fear of seeming racist by rejecting Obama, maybe some of it going with the seeming winner, maybe some of it repressed anger at the way people experience the economic situation. The come-from-behind horserace reporting provided those voters with an excuse to give up on the hopes they’d had for Obama, and essentially drop out or toss the dice for “change”.
Another reason was that rightwing opinion people consider themselves part of the Repuke team, whereas leftwing opinion writers are on the sidelines critiquing. Rightwingers cheer, leftwingers harp on shortcomings.
Strangely enough, that is not what happened. I say “strangely”, because that is how people perceive it, for understandable reasons, but it’s not correct. One factor never mentioned is that Romney’s sharp rise in the polls began TWO WEEKS BEFORE the debate. I’m getting this from Huffpost Pollster, which crunches hundreds of polls. Had Obama put in a sterling performance, they still were nearly equal by that point. And immediately after the debate, Romney’s rate of ascent moderated considerably, but was matched by Obama’s. in other words, before the debate Obama enjoyed a wide lead, after the debate a narrow one, but he continued to lead even as Romney continued to rise.
The debate had something to do with this only insofar as we would like to think Obama had the opportunity to send Romney back to the cellar and failed to do so, but because Romney’s sharp rise started two weeks before the debate, I’m not sure that’s really true. It certainly offered the opportunity for a wankfest of MSM and bloggers, led by Sullivan.
As for the cause of Romney’s sudden rise in the polls, commenter hz suggested here about a week ago that an important factor may have been that pollsters switched from a registered voter screen to a likely voter screen. What pollsters consider a “likely voter” is somewhat arbitrary. For example, Gallup, which has been producing pro-Romney outliers, is using a model of likely voters that greatly under-represents minority voters, similar to the breakdown for the 2000 election.
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2012-general-election-romney-vs-obama
I’d say that there are three classes of debate viewers:
(1) Folks looking to get happy about their candidate
(2) Folks listening for content
(3) Folks looking for reality TV
So seems to me that Obama should do well for any awake, sentient folks in class (2), with the exception of those leaning strongly neocon, in the event that Romney goes full-on Dan-Senor-John-Bolton.
The big toss-up is class (3). Obama’s performances so far have varied from inspiring to boring. But Romney has at times appeared either commanding, or annoyingly weaseloid.
In debate-1 we saw a lot of Commander Mitt, but only because Obama handed him the opportunity.
In debate-2 I thought his weaselly side drove the optics of memory.
So I’d say the downside tonite is greater for Romney, in that if his inner weasel cannot be restrained, and good luck with that, then memories of his big triumph of debate-1 will dim considerably.
Of the two, it’s Romney who has a bad case of hang-myself-if-i-get-enough-rope, and Obama knows this.
I’m not predicting who will win the debate. I am saying that Obama stands to lose more than he stands to gain.
Obama absolutely has more to lose in that he appears to have a slim electoral college advantage going in, so even modest movements in Romney’s direction can flip that.
But if Romney’s recently improved strength comes from the notion that maybe he’s suitable for the job after all, and tonite that comes back into question, then he may fall back too far to recover in the time left.
So I suppose if you’ve got a fish in the boat and it jumps out then you’ve lost more than the guy with lots of nibbles that suddenly stop.
He always has! He’s president and he could lose that. Romeny’s just a rich prick, and no one can ever take that away from him.
annoyingly weaseloidal
Or, for all you scrabble fans out there, annoyingly musteline.
ˈmʌstɪˌlaɪn -lɪn]
adj
relating to, or belonging to the Mustelidae, a family of typically predatory mammals including weasels, ferrets, minks, polecats, badgers, skunks, and otters: order Carnivora (carnivores)
It’s accurate, i suppose, but it hasn’t got any weasel in it.
Here’s Urban Dictionary:
Weaselish may be the way to go, but i’m not 100% convinced.
… just had this conversation with a Chinese English-as-Second-Language friend of mine, and he’s fascinated too, so I thought I’d pass it along, old and creaky though this thread may be.
Weaseloid. I like that description of Romney.
What Romney did in the first debate by lying and not being challenged was make it look like Obama had been lying about him. What Obama needed to do immediately was hit back on the substance with ads showing Romney’s math didn’t work, and his positions were not as stated in that debate. Instead they followed the tweeting and gave us three days of Big Bird. Thinking this would work means they were thinking of the electorate as children, which just reinforced in the voters who swung away the notion that Obama had been manipulating them. But Romney will take away Big BIrd! is transparent emotional manipulation, and people do know the election is more important than that, at least who will vote do.
Obama did try to counter this in the second debate, but now no longer has as much of a trust advantage over Romney, so the damage is not entirely reversible.
There’s some truth in that, but I don’t think any of those were major effects. Meanwhile Big Bird actually was a major issue, not in itself, but in what it symbolized. Romeny providing no clue to how he would cut expenses other than cutting public broadcasting, an obvious pander to RW extremists but economically inconsequential.
When you say “the damage is not entirely reversible”, you are right, but you have to remember that no matter what Obama does or does not do, something close to half of the electorate are going to vote against him, and that was in the cards from the beginning.
The problem is that reading big bird as symbolic requires knowledge of context. Swing voters don’t have that. They’re going to take making an issue of big bird at face value, and at face value it is trivial. Bill Clinton’s speech is the model. He spoke to people like adults, but didn’t assume they had enough background to make inferences. Obama’s first debate performance expected people to connect dots; you have to draw the picture yourself. You’re talking to people who are fundamentally intelligent and want to be addressed as adults, but have not been paying close attention.
You say that the debate presents more risk to Obama than Romney, but your rationale seems to be only because he’s in the lead, so a tie would benefit him.
I’m not sure I agree – Romney’s team needs some sort of game-changing event to give them a chance of winning. Even with all the Republican vote blocking if the polls are this way on election day Obama will almost certainly win. I know Nate Silver gives Romney about 1/3 probability of winning, but Nate’s methodology tends to overstate the likelihood of lower probability events. In 2008 he gave McCain a 4% chance of winning on election day – in truth it was not even 0.0004% of a chance given the weighted average of a 7 point lead in the polls.
Now, it may be that Romney’s team isn’t counting on the debate for being their game-changer. Perhaps they are counting on a flood of PAC adverts, or perhaps they have some soft of October Surprise up their sleeve. But even so he can’t lose any ground tonight or he’ll put it out of reach of even those debates.
Let’s also keep in mind that anyone who still might change their mind on voting (virtually no one who votes is, at this point, truly undecided – if they think they are they aren’t being honest with themselves) probably is NOT watching this debate. Note that in the two big debate bounces we’ve seen – after Bush-Gore 1 and after Obama-Romney 1 – the shifts started in the polling samples 2-3 days after the debate. What probably happened was people reacted to the post-debate reporting rather than the debate itself.
Therefore, what matters tonight isn’t scoring little points or great zingers or looking presidential. What matters is if some media theme comes out of the debate that is strong enough to change minds.
I, too, continue to puzzle about the huge nature of the bounce after debate 1. The enthusiasm gap sounds like a good theory, and there is some evidence to suggest it is true, but if it is true then either all of the current polls continue to understate Obama’s lead by 3-4 points OR they all were overstating Obama’s lead prior to the debate. Given the number of polls this doesn’t seem likely. Perhaps a better explanation was a lot of low-info voters are vaguely dissatisfied with the current economic climate but had heard a lot of crap about Romney so were defaulting to Obama. After hearing that Romney sounded good in the first debate – regardless of any details behind that – the low info people changed their mind and decided to vote for change.
If THAT’s true then the risk is truly on Romney’s side. He’s got his base plus the solid leaners and Obama’s got his base plus the solid leaners. But the easily-swayable middle is as far to Romney’s side as they are going to get. If anything goes wrong he’ll lose them.
But, the easily-swayable low info voter won’t be watching tonight, so what does Obama have to do to get the media to generate the kind of post-debate coverage that will bring the low info voter back to Obama? Being caught in a lie isn’t enough. Being corrected by the moderator, if it happens again, won’t be enough. Nor a zinger. Nor a stupic factual mistatement like Ford and eastern Europe (which was important to the press but not the people).
Nope, at this point the only thing that will break through to the low info voter who is already sick of the election season is to have one of the candidates lost self-control on camera. Obama won’t of course. Mitt might under the right conditions. There is a chance Obama could trigger those, if he lectured Mitt about, say, how Mitt’s behavior on Libya has literally endangered lives.
I expect Obama to play it safe and hope that OFA’s GOTV offsets GOP vote blocking. It’s his m.o. and that of his campaign managers. But it would be nice to see him take a shot at getting Mitt to overreact.
Well, Donald Trump claims to have a Bombshell about Obama that he’s gonna drop on Wednesday that will TOTALLY change everything! So I guess Romney has nothing to worry about. Let’s see if the media takes to the mystery prize Trump is hiding behind door number three…
Also, from the first linked article, I learned that IT’S INTERNATIONAL CAPS-LOCK DAY! TODAY IS APPARENTLY THE DAY WE CELEBRATE YELLING TROLLS ON THE INTERNETS!
Could the election turn on which of Gloria Allred and Donald Trump’s stunts backfires in more spectacular fashion?
I’m waiting for the October surprise of Rmoney’s tax returns
I’m reading Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson. It’s not coincidental that Mitt uses the same techniques and vehicles to hide his money as Meyer Lansky did with the Mob’s money after Al Capone went down for tax evasion. Bautista’s Cuba versus Cayman. And not surprising that one the Repubs’ high rollers is Adelson. Casinos and offshore accounts. Mitt’s favorite launderette.
Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate!
I disagree.
Willard has absolutely nothing to offer when it comes to foreign policy. He has no set FP.
All he wants is more war.
yeah, try selling that to the American people.
.
I mean, nobody got hurt, so is it ok to get a chuckle out of this?
due to a bit of headwind! I do hope he finds his Waterloo in Boca Raton.
Mitt closes tonight. But Obama opens. If Obama can start the wheels turning fast in a reverse Gish Gallop attack, throwing so many of Mitt’s flaps out that he can’t respond and keep the heat on Mitt has to respond by just winging it. And Mitt is not good at winging it.