Why are Republicans so certain of a Romney win?

[WhyteRain]

However, almost every Republican who posts on this board is 100% sure that Obama is going to lose, ignoring the hard evidence for the idea that America will be so enraged by Obamacare that that will be their only issue.  And they might be right, but why are they so certain?

I'm a former Democrat (bluedog variety) and now a registered Independent.  I think the rationale for seeing Obama lose badly is really simple:

The results of the 2010 election.

What's changed since then?

[WhyteRain]

OBAMA'S APPROVAL RATING MUCH WORSE THAN IT LOOKS

Proving once again that he is one of the nation’s most astute political analysts, the Washington Examiner's Michael Barone makes clear that President Barack Obama may be in more political trouble than he or many of his allies are prepared to publicly admit.

An alumnus of U.S. News & World Report, Barone deconstructs the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll and he shows that Obama’s negative 45 percent-48 percent job approval figures are deceptive and that the president is far weaker politically than the numbers suggest.
 
The poll, which admittedly is a snapshot of public opinion, shows the president has a 91 percent approval rating among black voters. “A little back of the envelope arithmetic,” Barone writes, “suggest that Obama’s job rating among the 88 percent or 89 percent of non-black respondents is about 39 percent positive and 54 percent negative.”

This article was written June 29, 2010.  http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-roff/2010/06/29/Obamas-Approval-Rating-Much-Worse-Than-It-Looks

Obama's current approval rating:  47.9% (RCP average).

Four months later, a crimson tide election.

Four months from now, what's to change that?

[WhyteRain]

Honestly, I don't think we can say Obama is going to lose because of 2010. Presidents lose during midterms all the time and still can get reelected. Otherwise, Clinton would've been a one termer.

By the Fall of 1996, Clinton had all but changed his party affiliation.

[WhyteRain]

I'm a right winger, and yet I have an uncomfortable gut feeling that Obama will win.

I rate that as only slightly more likely than Nancy Pelosi becoming the next House Speaker.

[WhyteRain]

WhyteRain's grasp of the concept of time might actually be worse than krazen's.

How so?

[WhyteRain]

Because they think they can defeat the President with a lot of negative attacks and believe that most voters share their very harsh disapproval of the President.

Democrats learned that lesson in 2004.

Of course, the opposite is true.

1.  The GOPers are nominating the guy who kept saying in the debates what a "nice guy" Obama is.

2.  Why go negative on Obama when you just have to stand back and point to the economy, to Obamacare, to unemployment, to the deficit and debt, to the MidEast, to Europe, to China, to Russia ... *taking a breath* ... to gay marriage, to illegal immigration, to Fast & Furious, to his fabulous vacays from Maui to the Costa Del Sol?

3.  How many times can Obama spike the corpse of Osama bin Laden?  That endzone dance is getting old.  And what does he say then?  "Elect me if you want more of the same!"

[WhyteRain]

However, almost every Republican who posts on this board is 100% sure that Obama is going to lose, ignoring the hard evidence for the idea that America will be so enraged by Obamacare that that will be their only issue.  And they might be right, but why are they so certain?

I'm a former Democrat (bluedog variety) and now a registered Independent.  I think the rationale for seeing Obama lose badly is really simple:

The results of the 2010 election.

What's changed since then?

The Tea Party and the GOP Congress have become more unpopular since 2010.

Not true, but, more importantly, are these the only things you can think of that have changed since Nov. 3, 2010?

[WhyteRain]

Many Democrats were confident that no thinking person could ever vote for someone as awful as Ronald Reagan in either 1980 or 1984. Barack Obama inspires the mirror image of contempt from partisan Republicans who think that President Obama is unspeakably dreadful.

I expect somewhat-similar results this time except that

(1) President Obama is going to get 52% to 55% of the popular vote, and

(2) even if he got 59% of the popular vote as did Reagan in 1984 he would get 'only' 410-450 electoral votes (because the state in question at that level  would be Texas). America is much more polarized in voting at least between the states than it was in 1980 and 1984.
 

Reagan was re-elected in a landslide because he took a worse economic situation than Obama faced and turned it around and had 6.1% GNP growth rate the five quarters before Nov. 1984.  Obama's numbers for the last 5 quarters?  1.9%

[WhyteRain]

Many Democrats were confident that no thinking person could ever vote for someone as awful as Ronald Reagan in either 1980 or 1984.

Well, considering that Ronald Reagan was dead by the time of the 2004 election, ...

Tpyo (mine) corrected. Of course it could have been Dubya in 2000 and 2004, too.

People tend to gravitate toward people who think more like them especially on polarizing issues and behavior.

I was doing some substitute teaching one day and I got a class full of troubled youth. The topic of drug and alcohol use came up and one of the students blurted out

"Doesn't everyone use drugs?"

"No", I responded. "It may be that everyone that you know uses drugs.  The people who use drugs and drink illegally (meaning anyone under 21 who drinks) naturally associate themselves with people who drink illegally and use drugs. The people who don't use drugs tend to go together in their own groups and want nothing to do with drug-users and illegal drinkers. So if you ever want to get off drugs and alcohol, the first thing that you need to do is to start associating with people who don't drink and do drugs. It won't be easy but it will be well worth it."   

I'm not going to compare partisanship one way or the other with underage drinking or drug use... but it is hard to imagine any liberal Democrat going to a Tea Party rally except to heckle. (I have never been at such a rally, and certainly not for that purpose, as such only reinforces the beliefs of Tea Party people). Maybe the more fitting analogy is in being part of the subcultures involved with horses or with 'classic cars'. Get involved with such people and you will soon get an exaggerated idea of how many people are involved with horses -- or classic cars.   

Good post.  Very true.  But liberals are far more insulated than conservatives and not just because liberals control nearly-all of the megaphones of the culture -- the news media, entertainment media, academia, labor unions, and professional associations.  Liberals insulate themselves -- like Obama describing himself in college, cozying up to the "Marxist professors" and other alienated-from-America groups.

I recall one Congressmen besieged at a press conference by about two dozen reporters demanding to know why he opposed same-sex marriage.  Finally the Congressman asked how many of the reporters knew a homosexual.  Every hand went up.  Then he asked them how many of them knew an evangelical.  One hand went up.  Homosexuals are 2% of the population; Evangelicals are 30%.

[WhyteRain]

However, almost every Republican who posts on this board is 100% sure that Obama is going to lose, ignoring the hard evidence for the idea that America will be so enraged by Obamacare that that will be their only issue.  And they might be right, but why are they so certain?

I'm a former Democrat (bluedog variety) and now a registered Independent.  I think the rationale for seeing Obama lose badly is really simple:

The results of the 2010 election.

What's changed since then?

The Tea Party and the GOP Congress have become more unpopular since 2010.

Not true, but, more importantly, are these the only things you can think of that have changed since Nov. 3, 2010?

You are in severe denial. The GOP in Congress is extremely unpopular. 

Before I deal with this, are there any other election factors that have substantially changed since the Crimson Tide election of Nov. '10?

[WhyteRain]

However, almost every Republican who posts on this board is 100% sure that Obama is going to lose, ignoring the hard evidence for the idea that America will be so enraged by Obamacare that that will be their only issue.  And they might be right, but why are they so certain?

I'm a former Democrat (bluedog variety) and now a registered Independent.  I think the rationale for seeing Obama lose badly is really simple:

The results of the 2010 election.

What's changed since then?

The Tea Party and the GOP Congress have become more unpopular since 2010.

Not true, but, more importantly, are these the only things you can think of that have changed since Nov. 3, 2010?

You are in severe denial. The GOP in Congress is extremely unpopular.  

Before I deal with this, are there any other election factors that have substantially changed since the Crimson Tide election of Nov. '10?

3 million new jobs, unemployment rate 1.6% lower (and even better in swing states), Republicans vote almost unanimously for Ryan plan, Bin Laden dead, much better turnout for Democratic-leaning demos in a presidential than midterm election, Romney tacked further to the right over the course of the GOP primary on many issues, Obama's executive order on immigration...

Your ellipsis at the end suggests you can think of others.  Can you?

As for the relative popularity of the Dem and GOP parties, I think one of the best indicators of that is the proportions of the electorate self-identifying with them, don't you?

Since 2004, Rasmussen has run a poll at the end of each month asking people to self-identify as Dems, Repubs, or Neither.  http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/archive/mood_of_america_archive/partisan_trends/summary_of_party_affiliation

As would be expected, the numbers for each party rises and falls with the party's election fortunes.  For example, at the end of Oct. 2004, just before Bush's reelection, 37.2% identified as GOP, 38.7% as Democrats, and 24.1% as Neither, giving the Dems a 1.5% advantage.  Two years later, just before the Dem landslide in 2006, the numbers were, respectively, 31.5, 37.7, 30.7, giving the Dems a 6.2% advantage.  Obviously, a few more "Neithers" voted for Bush than for Kerry, giving him the election, and then you had a meltdown of support for the GOP -- dropping 5.7 percentage points of self-identified GOPers in two years (interestingly the Dems lost support, too, but only 1.0 point).  With the big drop in GOPers and the "Neithers" breaking more for the Dems, the Dems won big in '06.

Let's look a bit closer at the last two elections, 2008 and 2010.  I want to look at both the October polls taken a few days before each election and the January polls taken within weeks of the new party taking power.  Then we'll look at today (well, at May 31, 2012).

In Oct 2008, the self-identified GOPers were 33.3%, the Dems 40.3%, and the Neithers 26.4% -- giving the Dems a 7.1% point advantage (figures rounded).  At the end of January, 2009, with the Democrats newly-ensconced in the White House, the figures were 32.6, 40.9, and 26.6, giving the Dems an 8.3% point advantage.

Of course, there's a lot of euphoria in the percentages.  One would expect for the Dem number to fall back to some more historical average. And sure enough it did.  By the end of May, 2010, the figures were 32.0%, 35.1%, and 32.8%, reducing the Dem lead to 3.1% points.

Now, let's look at the 2010 elections the same way as we did the 2008 ones.  By Oct 2010, the numbers had changed to 33.4, 36.3%, and 30.3%, giving the Dems a 2.9% point lead.  Basically what happened is that, of the Neithers, between May 2010 and Oct 2010, a roughly equal amount became GOPers and Dems (1.4 points to the GOP, 1.2 points to the Dems).  This was unsurprising because the May, 2010 polls showed an unusually high number of Neithers.

So, Oct 2010, just before a big GOP win, the figures are 33.4, 36.3, and 30.3, a 2.9% Dem lead.
At the end of Jan, 2011, just after the GOP House convened, the figures are 35.4, 35.0, 29.6  -- now the Repubs lead by 0.4 points.  

Let's review:  In Oct, 2008, the Dems lead by 7.1.  In Jan '09, it's 8.3.  By May, 2010, it's fallen to 3.1 and by Oct 2010, to 2.9.  Then we get a little Republican euphoric wave and they take the lead (for the first time in the history of the poll).  It's 0.4 for them in Jan. 2011.

Now, based on all the historical evidence, if the Republicans are becoming more unpopular after they take the House in 2011, then their self-identification advantage should fall.  But it didn't.  In the most recent poll, May 31, 2012, the self-identifiers were 35.7% GOP, 33.8% Dem, and 30.5% Neither.  So since Oct 2010 -- days before the Crimson Tide election -- the Repubs are up from 33.4 to 35.7 (2.3 points) while the Dems are down from 36.3 to 33.8 (2.8 points).  Since Jan, 2011, the peak of the euphoria, the Repubs are still up by 0.3 points (35.4 to 35.7) and the Dems are still down 1.2 points (35.0 to 33..  

(This is starting to remind me of all the work I've done comparing Obama's economic recovery from those of the recessions in the earlier decades -- nothing I do with the data makes it look good for the Obama recovery record.)

The bottom line is this:  Every election produces a spike for the winning side.  Most of them are followed by a deep slump.  After the 2010 election, that didn't occur.

All Romney has to do to win is make this a referendum on Obama-Pelosi-Reid.  And not screw up in the debates.  That's all.  And I didn't see him making any serious mistakes in all those GOP debates -- even though I wanted to, seeing as he was my least-favorite candidate on the stage.

[Edit]  I could have added some real-world examples since Jan 2011, such as a Tea Party Republican winning Anthony Weiner's district -- a heavily-Jewish district in Brooklyn.  And then in Wisconsin, where Scott Walker got more votes running unopposed in the GOP primary than his opponents got combined in the Dem primary.  

Unless something weird happens -- even with MSM SuperPAC support for Obama -- I can't see this as being other than an easy GOP win.  (Personally, I'd rather see Obama win than Romney, so I'm not being biased.)

[Edit #2]  Actually, after watching the MSM crush the mighty Clinton Machine in the 2008 primaries and crush the Tea Party in the 2012 primaries, I said I would never again underestimate them.  Am I giving too little respect to their power when I say they can't carry Obama's mangled candidacy over the finish line one more time?

[WhyteRain]

OBAMA'S APPROVAL RATING MUCH WORSE THAN IT LOOKS

Proving once again that he is one of the nation’s most astute political analysts, the Washington Examiner's Michael Barone makes clear that President Barack Obama may be in more political trouble than he or many of his allies are prepared to publicly admit.

An alumnus of U.S. News & World Report, Barone deconstructs the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll and he shows that Obama’s negative 45 percent-48 percent job approval figures are deceptive and that the president is far weaker politically than the numbers suggest.
 
The poll, which admittedly is a snapshot of public opinion, shows the president has a 91 percent approval rating among black voters. “A little back of the envelope arithmetic,” Barone writes, “suggest that Obama’s job rating among the 88 percent or 89 percent of non-black respondents is about 39 percent positive and 54 percent negative.”

This article was written June 29, 2010.  http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-roff/2010/06/29/Obamas-Approval-Rating-Much-Worse-Than-It-Looks

Obama's current approval rating:  47.9% (RCP average).

Four months later, a crimson tide election.

Four months from now, what's to change that?

Do black people's opinions not count or something?  I don't get why you just arbitrarily subtract black voters from the electorate like that.

You raise an interesting question.  But because I am neither Barone nor the reporter who wrote the story, I can only guess at the answer.  I think, though, that the point of the story was -- more than three months before the Crimson Tide election of 2010 -- Barone correctly divined that the election results would be worse for the Democrats than the polls would indicate historically.

Now, as to my guess about why Barone thought it was important to strip out the black people's poll responses, I would say that maybe it was reflective of his feeling that Obama's strongest supporters would be less likely to vote in a midterm election or he was getting at the fact that white Democratic officeholders were greatly endangered.

[WhyteRain]

However, almost every Republican who posts on this board is 100% sure that Obama is going to lose, ignoring the hard evidence for the idea that America will be so enraged by Obamacare that that will be their only issue.  And they might be right, but why are they so certain?

I'm a former Democrat (bluedog variety) and now a registered Independent.  I think the rationale for seeing Obama lose badly is really simple:

The results of the 2010 election.

What's changed since then?

Yes, you're certain to win after the incumbent party has a bad midterm. Just ask presidents Dole, Dukakis, Mondale, Stevenson, Dewey, and Willkie.

You're not much of a reader, are you?

I asked, "What's changed since then?"

Let me help you with a couple of these, focusing on the question, "what changed?": 
1938 and 1940, World War II started.
Between 1946 and 1948, the incumbent transformed his foreign policy from unpopular pro- to popular anti-Soviet.
The 1982 election wasn't much of a "rejection" of Reagan.  His party had won 35 House and 12 Senate seats in 1980.  In 1982, he lost 26 House seats, but 14 of those were due to effective Democratic gerrymandering (I did a 50-page paper on U.S. House gerrymandering, featuring the 1982 election, in law school) and lost no Senate seats at all.
Between 1994 and 1996, the incumbent switched parties in all but name ("the erruh of big gummint is ovah").

Now, to return to my question:

What has changed between Nov. 3, 2010 and now that would give voters good reasons for changing their minds about Obama?

[WhyteRain]

This is a big part of the reason: http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Sort-Clustering-Like-Minded/dp/0618689354. When everyone you know thinks that Obama is an Atheist Kenyan Muslim Homosexual Socialist, it's difficult to imagine how there can be so many people out there who think any differently. This is a big part of the reason why so many Democrats and liberals were incredulous and shocked when Bush was reelected in 2004, even though he had been leading in the polls for months (even if not by much).

Excellent point.  I call it the "herd mentality".  It seems to be strongest in urban areas. 

[WhyteRain]

This is a big part of the reason: http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Sort-Clustering-Like-Minded/dp/0618689354. When everyone you know thinks that Obama is an Atheist Kenyan Muslim Homosexual Socialist, it's difficult to imagine how there can be so many people out there who think any differently. This is a big part of the reason why so many Democrats and liberals were incredulous and shocked when Bush was reelected in 2004, even though he had been leading in the polls for months (even if not by much).

Excellent point.  I call it the "herd mentality".  It seems to be strongest in urban areas. 

Yeah, I've noticed it in the Birmingham, Dallas, and Salt Lake City metro areas too, actually.

Just look for voting patterns (like when 75 or 80% of residents vote for same party/candidate) and for patterns of intolerant laws involving personal behavior (smoking, sugar intake, painting your house purple, etc.).  When you see that, you'll know you're in herd-land.