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Normally the national presidential polls tends to line up rather closely with the polling in the swing states. This election, however, there is a huge disparity. President Obama has only a small lead nationally but a large lead in the swing states.
From Washington Post, about their new poll:
Nationally, the race is unmoved from early September, with 49 percent of likely voters saying they would vote for Obama if the election were held today and 47 percent saying they would vote for Romney. Among all registered voters, Obama is up by a slim five percentage points, nearly identical to his margin in a poll two weeks ago.
But 52 percent of likely voters across swing states side with Obama and 41 percent with Romney in the new national poll, paralleling Obama’s advantages in recent Washington Post polls in Florida, Ohio and Virginia.
Swing states are “swing” because they tend to have a partisan make-up similar to the whole country. There simply shouldn’t be this huge of difference between how a candidate is doing nationally and how they are doing in the individual states that tend to mirror the partisan voting patterns of the entire nation.
This disparity could be the result of some strange new dynamic in which the reddest states have gotten dramatically more Republican while the rest of the country hasn’t changed, but that seems unlikely.
The most likely source for this disparity seems to be the campaigns. The one thing that makes swing states different from the rest of the country is that they are the only states where both presidential campaigns are truly working to try to persuade voters. It would seem that in states where the Obama campaign is actively engaged, it is successfully helping Obama overperform.
While the candidates are relatively evenly matched nationally, in the states where the two campaign infrastructure are directly competing against each other the Romney team is losing significantly.
8 Comments
Do you have any examples of how their running the campaign on the ground better than the Romney campaign? Is there a particular strategy that they or the Romney campaign is implementing?
Romney is either one of those CEO’s who surrounds himself with sycophants and incompetents because he is threatened by talented people or the Republican brain trust made sure he was the best worst candidate to put up against Obama
since they want a D in charge when austerity hits the fan.
OT but are you going to cover the Democracy Now version of the debate on WED.
The situation that the Romney campaign faces is that after five solid years of GOP attacks on Obama (and never on anything critical, because those are the things that Republicans agree with), Obama has no downside that the Obama campaign can be driven to. And after the 47% remark, Romney’s potential upside tops out at 53%. Not good to insult voters.
What the Obama campaign did in swing states early was play ads of Obama’s accomplishments–you know the list. And what they have done recently is play ads of Mitt Romney’s statements. The more that folks in these states are exposed to Romney, the worse he does.
The ground game is only beginning, but it seems that the Obama camp has enough volunteers to have already sorted out likely Obama voters and campaign volunteers and is moving on to the preliminary motivate the vote phase. The Romney campaign seems to pin its hopes on media and the network of religious Republican churches that have turned out the vote in the past.
THe trouble the Romney camp has can easily be explained by the fact that their candidate is a republican (bad brand name), and that republican is Mitt Romney (liar, tax evader, corporate raider, who wants more tax breaks for the rich)
As far as his campaign workers, I wouldn’t give their problems to a monkey on a rock.
I think Jon is on to something here, President Obama is running one of the best campaigns in the history of Presidential campaigns.
If you look at past elections, One or Two scandals would sink a campaign, but not Obama, he has almost too many to count, yet he seems invincible. . .
I marvel at him, because he can be accused of almost anything (lying, cover ups, wasting tax money, etc) Some of them are true, but most of them are false.
He just moves on, he rarely ever even addresses the accusation. And the best part is he’ll just continue to do the same things he’s doing or saying.
An Example is this Muslim video, news reports say it wasn’t the video it was a preplanned attack and they wanted to used the video as an excuse. President Obama says it was the video, and continued to say that 8 to 10 days later, even today he’d probably still blame the video, and it doesn’t seem to hurt him for being out of touch with reality or being out of the loop on National security issues.
When President Obama is re-elected he will be the only President to be re-elected with less votes than he got in his first election. In order to do this he has to have the best campaign in history on the ground in these swing States to keep them in his column.
Romney is a very flawed candidate.
I think the fact that he won the Republican primary is evidence of how incredibly bad the other Republican candidates were.
That he was ever neck and neck with an incumbent President with significant personal charisma (and while the nation is still at war to boot) is evidence of how bad a President Obama has been.
No incumbent U.S. President has been defeated while the U.S. was at war.
The events in Libya and elsewhere that began on 911 will ensure an Obama victory next month, unless Romney somehow manages to appear superior in that realm.
Given Romney’s performance so far, I very much doubt that is going to happen. But, I think Romney will try to hit hard on that between now and the election, starting Wednesday evening.
I’m starting to believe that many Americans understand just how badly BV$H ran this country and much of the world’s economy into the ground and don’t blame Obama for starting his Presidency in a huge hole that he didn’t dig. That leaves RMONEY trying to tell a majority of us he wants to get out of the hole by using a bulldozer. Granted Barry has been using a shovel instead, nevertheless the majority it appears we’ll still take the shovel.
I think it could be that the Red states have gotten Redder–particularly in the Midwest. With 4 years of attacks and socialism thrown at the Prez, I think it’s started to work around here. Missouri has gone from a hotly contested swing state in the past 12 years to solid Red because I think Obama has lost whatever was left of the Dem white male vote. The neighboring Red states I think have been similarly affected and are getting Redder. The enthusiasm for Obama has totally waned as well. Kansas City was blanketed with Obama yard signs in ’08, but now there’s just a few here and there.