What If Romney Catches Obama?

Andrew Sullivan frequently uses Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner as a metaphor for Obama outpacing his various nemeses. This particular episode speaks to me more than others:



To me, Romney doesn't seem to have a plan to win. He seems to have a plan to get it to a tie. Then what? It sounds like a bit of a "hoping for a coin flip" strategy. For instance, notice what Neil Newhouse (Romney's pollster) said today in a memo for NBC News on Obama's post-convention bounce in the polls:

"Don't get too worked up about the latest polling," Newhbouse writes in the memo. "While some voters will feel a bit of a sugar-high from the conventions, the basic structure of the race has not changed significantly. The reality of the Obama economy will reassert itself as the ultimate downfall of the Obama presidency, and Mitt Romney will win this race."

So, the plan is that the Romney campaign won't get too worked up and "the basic structure" of the race will reassert itself (I agree) and ... Romney will win. That last part needs a little fleshing out Neil. "The basic structure" of the race ... had Obama winning. Not by a lot. But it does seem like a pretty clear, stable pattern.

The Romney strategy, in short, is to "catch" Obama. They figure he's struggling to get above 50% (aside from the "bounce" polling) and so the "basic structure" of the race is roughly a 47-45 lead for Obama with about 8% undecided. And they figure most of those undecideds will break for Romney in the last few days.

Here's the problem: IF they break 5:3, Romney has "caught" Obama. Romney needs them to break 6:2 his way. I think that even if Romney "catches" Obama, he's going to be in a position much like Wile E. Coyote (Super Genius) above.

Obama Bouncing

It appears my prediction of a very modest to zero bounce was incorrect.

Obama now leads by 4 points in the Gallup and Reuters tracking polls and by 2 in the Rasmussen tracking poll. That's a significant shift when you consider that some of the data in these tracking polls is still from before Obama's speech.

Nate Silver estimates this means Obama has been running about 7-9 points ahead nationally in the post-convention polling

Look, this is called a bounce for a reason. It bounces up and then comes back down. But sometimes it doesn't come all the way back down and you'd surely rather spend your time bouncing from up 1 or so to up 4 or 5 and back than bouncing the other way. And Nate Silver is at least suggesting the bounce could be bigger than a few points. We'll see. But it isn't zero or "very modest."

The Anti-Bounce?

Lots of Democrats are hoping for a big bounce in the wake of the Democratic Convention which was capped off by a terrific speech by the President.

My initial reaction was that the speech and the performance were very good (particularly the end) but that Obama would get very little or no bounce because of many of the same reasons that Romney did not get much of a bounce.

Today, the jobs report was very disappointing. The unemployment rate ticked down because many people stopped looking for work but the economy added under 100,000 jobs.

The bounce was likely to be non-existent and now this jobs report is bad so could Obama actually lose ground in the polls? Not likely. First, some will focus on the fact that the unemployment rate ticked down, even though it is not for good reasons. Second, the news is disappointing but not disastrous. The "locked in" electorate is not likely to be moved in EITHER direction very easily.

Finally, if anyone is looking for the tiniest ray of hope in the jobs report (or if you're just inclined to be blissfully delusional), it is this: The public sector continued to shed jobs in August and public sector job losses were revised upwards for June and July. You're probably thinking "how is that good news?" The answer is that those public sector job losses are likely to stop in September and October. If that could be combined with some slightly better private sector job growth, the jobs picture could improve.

But that's a faint hope for another day. Today, I think the Obama campaign is hoping to just tread water.

Bump Bump

Bill Clinton was clearly fantastic last night. Deval Patrick and Michelle Obama were great the night before. My guess is that Obama will be very good if not great tonight. There are also some indications the jobs report due out tomorrow morning will be decent at worst and possibly quite good.

So, what will it mean? Will Obama get the bounce that Romney seems not to have gotten?

I don't know but, if forced to guess, I think he will get a small bump ... a muted bump. David Plouffe made the case today that the campaign is not expecting a bump. That was at least partly his effort to lower expectations of those excited by Clinton's speech. But there is some truth in his explanation. Much of the electorate is locked in. Also, there are simply less people watching than we've seen in the past. Instead, what people see is the media reviews the next day. And there, they'll see Fox panning it and MSNBC saying it was better than the sermon on the mount. They'll see what they want to see.

All of that is my guess. But, if I'm right, it is not all that bad for Obama. He's winning right now. If the conventions pass with little or no movement, Romney will have missed an opportunity to change the dynamic of the race and I think he needs that dynamic to change. There will be more opportunities but not too many of them. It matters that he's missed one here.

Eye of the Tiger

Arguably the best quote of the entire campaign season is below:

We are very sorry that your song "Eye of the Tiger" was associated with the 2012 Newt Gingrich campaign.

This was in a letter from the Gingrich campaign yesterday.

It is just pure gold. But the story just wouldn't be the same if we didn't have the video. Here is Gingrich entering CPAC with the song playing him in. Powerful stuff:

No Bounce?

It is awfully hard to discern a bounce in Romney's numbers. Lots of polling has been done in the few days since the GOP convention ended but there's not much there there as Mark Blumenthal points out.

Let me posit a few theories as to why this is:

1) The GOP Convention was a flop. Perhaps there's no bounce because the convention just didn't go well (see Eastwood, Clint). I don't think the convention went particularly well so this is at least part of the explanation. I was somewhat surprised to see some rave reviews for Romney's speech, even on MSNBC. I didn't think it was bad. It just wasn't very memorable in any respect.

2) Having the conventions back to back like this with Labor Day Weekend in between mutes the impact of both. I think this is part of the story. In addition, the DNC had a rapid response team at the GOP Convention and the GOP will do the same in Charlotte. The conventions do not dominate the media space or even the tv space the same way they once did (see #3) and, in short, they are right on top of each other canceling each other out.

3) Conventions are simply non-events and the public has caught on. If we take the view from 30,000 feet for a moment, it is important to remember that conventions were actually newsworthy events just about 4 decades ago. In 1968, there was plenty to cover when nominations were at stake. Even in 1976 and 1980, there was drama over the VP nod (Republicans in 1976) and over the Kennedy/Carter kerfuffle (1980). Since then, conventions have really been staged commercials. For a couple of decades, people tuned in thinking they might see something (a la 1980 or 1968). But then the number of channels available exploded as did the various modes of delivery after Al Gore graciously invented the world wide interweb (a series of tubes). So, two things have combined to end the convention's dominance of media. We've all caught on that there's nothing really happening and we've all got lots of other things to watch and do now. In short, we can watch a 3-day infomercial - "3 days to stronger Abs!!!" - or we can watch something that is important - baseball. Now, it is true that even those watching find out what happened (through a media filter mind you) in the couple of days after the convention by hearing about it, reading about it, etc. But they tend to see very small snippets like the big gaffe (see Eastwood, Clint) or the soaring moments (see ... ???).

I think all three of these theories have something useful to offer in explaining Romney's "little to no" bounce. But I think it is probably correct that #3 is the biggest piece of it. The only people tuning in are political junkies who've already made up their minds. Romney's performance (and the whole GOP for that matter) was fairly weak. But there really wasn't much of an opportunity for them to create a big bounce anyway.

UPDATE: Nate Silver has a piece out this morning that somewhat along the lines of the argument in #3. He says in part:

The three smallest bounces for the challenging candidates came in the last three elections. Bounces aren’t what they used to be, perhaps because voters are saturated with information months in advance of an election, increased partisanship and sterilized conventions that may have become too polished for their own good.

The catch is that each of these things is a structural factor, and therefore might predict that Mr. Obama won’t get much of a bounce either. Maybe this is just the new normal.

2008 Had Joe the Plumber and ...

... 2012 has "Invisible Obama" ... who has his own twitter account.

I recommend the first interview (after Clint Eastwood's obviously).

Clint Eastwood

Yeah, it was bizarre. And no, it doesn't matter in the long run. As Steve Schmidt said, it won't cost Romney a single vote.

But ... if you're a Republican, wouldn't you rather have that 12 minutes of the nation's attention back to do something productive with them?

Larry Kudlow ...

... was disappointed with Mitt Romney's speech. And that pretty much sums it up.

It was a non-event and therefore a missed opportunity for Romney.

Larry Kudlow points out right after the speech that Mitt Romney is going to launch a "jobs tour" after he becomes president. Kudlow observed he didn't know what the heck that means. Answer: It doesn't mean anything. It is an empty platitude ... like the rest of the speech.

How big will the convention bounce be? 4-5 points is my guess and I think it will vanish faster than the usual bounce.

I think where we emerge in about 2 weeks (after both convention bounces fade) is Nate Silver's model showing Obama with a 72% chance of winning. Let's see if I'm right.

Amateur Psychology Hour

Mitt Romney is still being forced to talk about his taxes which, just as an aside, is really not what he wants to be doing and he'd be better off if he would ... JUST RELEASE HIS TAX RETURNS!!!

But whatever. I'm tired of railing on that one. What's new is that Romney is taking a new (also stupid) path by conflating taxes and charity. He's wanting to point out that, when you put this tax payments and his charitable donations together, he actually pays quite a bit more than the 13.9 percent he paid in 2010. How many things are wrong with this business? Let's count:

1) Romney's new strategy (to conflate taxes and charity) still has him talking about tax returns. He might as well discuss animal transport. That's about as good a topic for him.

2) The further he goes into this topic, the more times he ends up pointing out that he paid just 13.9% in taxes in 2010. That number just keeps coming up like a bad penny.

3) This brings me to my main point. Romney is now planning to release his 2011 taxes on October 15 (terrible idea, but okay). He was asked what his effective tax rate was in 2011 and his response?

I think the most recent year is 13.6 or something like that.

Oy vey. "Or something like that?" I'm not a psychologist but it seems to me that Mitt's got a tell. If you're trying to pretend your just guesstimating, you probably don't want to give a number that includes tenths of a percentage point. That's not an estimate. That's a pretty freakin' precise number.

To put this another way, you could have said: "It is 13.6%." Or you could have said, "It 13 or 14 percent, something like that." But you can't put those two options together. It is like the police are asking a suspect, "So what time did you leave the bar?" and the suspect responds, "A few seconds past 4:03 or something like that." That is a suspect who is hiding something.

I'm perfectly happy letting Mitt twist in the wind on this all through the Fall but, if I were advising him, I'd be saying, "Mitt, just release the taxes already. Release them all. It is still August. Nobody's paying attention. Your convention will drown out the story soon enough even if it is bad. Just get it over with."

... Or something like that.