For the republicans waiting for the big Romney moneyball to hit: It's not coming.Apparently most of the money that the Rmoney campaign has been reporting that they raised was earmarked for the RNC and downticket races. There is apparently not as much faith in the Republican party's main ticket as previously believed.
I think this gives a lot more weight to the theory that they never planned for Mitt to take the big chair to begin with, and the main goal was to further secure Congressional seats.
I really wonder what the number of people who are simply not going to vote for Obama, no matter what the alternative, looks like at this point. It concerns me that Romney may not have to convince all that many people to make up the difference between him and the White House based on that number.
Well, I think at this point those people were either always going to vote for Romney to begin with or simply weren't going to vote. I think the centrist racists are probably less likely to vote at all with how things have gone the last few weeks. Polls certainly seem to be supporting that idea. The candidates aren't exactly neck and neck right now in most of the battleground states that actually matter. If Virginia and Ohio keep polling at +5 this is going to be a walkover.
I've been saying from the beginning that Democrat turnout was something that was going to matter way more than Republican turnout and I stand by that assertion. Republican outrage at Obama has been set at 11 since the inauguration. Romney could have made a decent showing at the polls without a single day of campaigning, just fueled on partisan hatred of the sitting president. Multiple polls have shown that most Republican voters aren't voting for Mitt Romney, they're voting against Obama. I think turnout for them would have been high regardless. That's why I thought before, and continue to think now that campaigning to the right has been a huge mistake for Mitt's presidential aspirations. His support among independents isn't great and is nonexistent among minority voters and women. He had multiple opportunities this entire election cycle to reach out to those groups and I can't think of any legitimate attempt he has made at it, other than a middling-OK speech he did for the NAACP. As far as rhetoric goes, he's made some very vague, slightly toxic statements about policy and a series of increasingly more offensive gaffes that marginalize blue collar workers and the middle class - 47%, $200,000 is a middle class salary, etc.
I'm of the opinion that Mccain lost in 2008 not because of Palin (though she was a symptom of what I think is the greater cause) or because he was old, but because he went too far to the right when the American people were expecting a centrist. The same thing is happening now with Mitt. Mitt had a great amount of potential to be a centrist leader, and he blew it pandering to his base, which I'm simply not convinced wouldn't have shown up to the polls regardless of how much stumping he did to them. Now, just over a month before the election, he is scrambling to try to get back to the middle and get the handful of undecideds out there to actually vote for him. He's slipping in battleground polls across the country and nationally he is between 4 and 8 points behind his challenger (depending on who si doing the polling) and pundits are already writing the campaign off as a failure. People are calling this the worst run campaign in the history of the US.
I think the best thing that could happen for us is if the Republican party sees it as a mandate to go even further to the right. Things would get pretty miserable for us in red states for a while, but maybe if things get bad enough and the electorate changes as the oldest people die off, and the younger voters get to the age where they think voting is important, progressive politics will become something attainable again. At the very least, it will force the GOP to either move to the center like conservative parties in every other country have, or risk dying out.
Author
Topic: 2012: The Mayans Warned Us Of Stupid Elections (Read 88502 times)