I tend not to make predictions about elections. There are a bunch of reasons why that’s true, but the most important may be simply that it doesn’t make any difference what I think is going to happen. What matters is what happens.
Having said that, here are some thoughts about the state of the presidential campaign going into its final weekend:
1 – Having a better field operation is a good thing. The Romney campaign in particular and Republicans in general have repeatedly boasted that their GOTV operation is as good as or better than the Obama campaign’s. The problem for the Romney folks is twofold: 1) performing better than the 2008 McCain-Palin campaign is a low (and insufficient) bar to hurdle, and 2) pretty much every reporter who’s looked into this question comes away disagreeing.
Take this story from the Tampa Bay Times about early voting in Florida and multiply it across all the swing states. Republicans correctly point out that Democrats are “banking” fewer early votes, and by a narrower margin, than in 2008.
Florida Obama campaign director Ashley Walker counters by explaining “This isn’t 2008. We don’t have 15 days of early vote. We have 8 days, and so it’s a different race. When you really dig down and start looking at at these numbers in who is turning out with these vote-by-mail numbers and early vote numbers, more of our sporadic, irregular voters than theirs by a three-to-one margin. And that means we have more old faithfuls to come out on election day.“
Not only does Obama have more than twice as many campaign offices in Florida than Romney does, the Obama campaign is, roughly speaking, more than twice as thoughtful and strategic about how to get their voters to the polls. Romney’s still a slight favorite to win Florida but all things being equal, you’d rather have the Obama GOTV operation working for you in a close election.
2 – Having a consistent message is a good thing. It’s generally a signal that you’ve found a message that’s working for your candidate, your supporters and that helps with reaching undecided voters.
From the outside it looks like the Romney campaign has resorted to a “throw everything and hope enough sticks to the wall” messaging strategy in recent weeks. In the week after the final presidential debate, Romney’s campaign released six new TV ads with one thing in common: they were based on falsehoods.
Otherwise, they were all over the place: from Romney’s “jobs plan”, to attacking Obama’s record on welfare, from energy issues to the size of the Navy, from Obama’s non-existent “apology tour” to Chrysler’s non-existent plan to move American jobs to China. Aside from their mendacity, there’s no consistent or coherent theme in these ads. Losing campaigns tend to change their message more than winning campaigns.
By contrast, the big messaging change from the Obama campaign in the final weeks of the campaign amounted to little more than a punctuation change in their slogan (from “Forward.” to “Forward!“).
3 – Having the polls in your favor is a good thing. It’s an old truism in politics that “the only poll that matters is on election day”. On the other hand, when there’s as much state and national polling as there’s been with the presidential campaign, polls can give a sense both of the current status of a campaign and the direction in which it’s moving. That’s why it can’t be comforting for the Romney campaign—whether among its top strategists in Boston or its volunteers on the ground in Hamilton County, Ohio—to look at the forecasting models built on analyzing hundreds of polls and see that they all point towards an increasing likelihood of an Obama victory.
4 – Having external factors break your way in the closing weeks is a good thing. Mitt Romney won the first presidential debate on Oct. 3. Not only has the Obama-Biden ticket won the last three debates, they’ve also benefited from two Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly jobs reports that show the unemployment rate dropping below 8% for the first time since Obama took office, FEMA’s seemingly effective response to Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey Gov. (and Republican convention keynoter) Chris Christie’s de facto endorsement of Pres. Obama, as well as actual endorsements from perhaps the two most prominent centrist figures in American politics: Colin Powell and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
No one of those occurrences makes a big difference in a campaign. But if you’re trailing as Romney is (see #3), every external event that doesn’t help (or hurts) your campaign makes it that much harder to get your message out, rally your troops and persuade undecideds.
5 – Forcing your opponent on the defensive is a good thing. Look at where the candidates are spending their time. With the exception of the by-now-quadrennial-final-weekend-stop-in-Pennsylvania by the Republicans, all the candidate appearances are in the nine swing states (CO, FL, IA, NC, NV, NH, OH, VA, WI) on which Romney’s hopes rest. The fact that Romney spent an entire day in Florida with less than a week to go doesn’t mean he’s going to lose…but it does mean he doesn’t think he’s winning.
6 – Having a strong team of speakers is a good thing. If you’re the Romney campaign, who—other than Romney and Ryan—do you have to speak on your behalf? Who do you send onto the Sunday morning news shows? Who can travel to Ohio or Florida and both turn out a crowd and get them excited? I mean no disrespect to John McCain and Scott Walker, but if they’re the two best representatives a presidential campaign has, then it might be a sign that your bench is a little thin.
The Obama campaign by contrast not only uses Michelle Obama and Jill Biden to great effect, it has the more-popular-than-ever Bill Clinton making multiple daily appearances. The most recent Republican president’s only “public” appearance during the campaign was at a Cayman Islands investors conference yesterday.
As I said at the beginning, I don’t like making predictions. But, having worked on and been around a certain number of political campaigns in my day, I’m reasonably confident in asserting that the general mood today among people working on the Obama campaign—from David Axelrod and Jim Messina on down to the volunteers doorknocking in Clark County, Nevada is more upbeat than it is for those working to elect Mitt Romney.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/