Geoffrey Skelley’s post “Less Than 50 Days to Go” at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball takes a look at mid-to-late September Gallup RV polling relationship to final results for all 15 presidential elections since 1952, and notes: “The most obvious conclusion we can make from these data is that it’s better to be ahead at this point. Of the 15 elections between 1952 and 2008, only twice has a candidate who held a lead around this time failed to win the election.” Those two exceptions are Nixon in 1960 and Gore in 2000, who did in fact win the popular vote. Obama has a one-point lead in the most current Gallup poll of RVs, but is up higher in other polls.
WaPo’s Sean Sullivan has an encouraging update/round-up on Democratic prospects for holding their U.S. Senate majority.
Ditto for Eric Kleefeld’s Talking Points memo post “Senate Races Looking Up For Democrats” and Josh Kraushaar’s “Democrats Hold Momentum in Battle for Senate” at the National Journal.
Regarding the latest UMass Lowell/Boston Herald poll showing Scott Brown with a 4-point lead over Elizabeth Warren in the MA Senate race, coming after 5 other polls show Warren in the lead, poll analyst Mark Blumenthal puts it in perspective at HuffPo Pollster: “The five other polls have shown Warren leading by margins varying from two to six percentage points. Relatively small sample sizes likely contribute to the variation. All but one of the new surveys sampled from 400 to 600 likely voters, for reported margins of error ranging from +/- 4 percent to +/- 5 percent…When combined in the HuffPost Pollster Trend chart, designed to smooth out the random variation inherent in most polls, the new surveys show a virtual dead heat, with Warren just a half percentage point ahead of Brown (46.2 percent to 45.7 percent).”
Those who want to help Warren widen her very slim lead can do so at this ActBlue page.
At In These Times, David Moberg reports on the AFL-CIO’s innovative “RePurpose” GOTV program being mobilized in six battleground states. One interesting technique: ” …Union members can accumulate points for the electoral work they’ve done. They then exchange them…for the opportunity to strategically direct the campaign of any AFL-CIO-endorsed candidate or initiative…Knock on enough doors, for example, and earn the right to decide that more resources and volunteer time should go into phone banking for Obama…”
Jon Healey’s L.A. Times op-ed “Who knew Obama believed in redistribution? Umm, everybody” captures the “duh” reaction being heard at water coolers across America regarding the GOP-driven “expose.” He could have added that more Americans believe Romney, not Obama, is the more radical redistributionist, as indicated by recent polls opposing his support for additional tax breaks for the wealthy.
Deborah Charles of Reuters.com has an update on early voting as it begins in several states and she reviews the status of court challenges to Republican measures to restrict it.
At The Atlantic, Mariah Blake has a disturbing report on “The Ballot Cops,” the voter suppression activities of a group called ‘True the Vote,” which smells a lot like a modernized version of the Republicans’ disgraceful ‘ballot security’ campaigns of earlier elections.
Here’s a well-tailored headline Democrats need to broadcast far and wide: “Senate Republicans kill veterans jobs bill,” as reported by Joan McCarter at Daily Kos. Says McCarter: “The unemployment rate for Iraq, Afghanistan and Gulf War II-era Veterans–those who would have most benefited from the bill–is now at 10.9 percent, but Republicans blocked this bill because they don’t want anything that could remotely help anyone to happen under President Obama’s watch…That, and they don’t really give a shit about veterans, much like Mitt Romney, who called the men and women fighting in Afghanistan items on a laundry list.”
Month: September 2012
Ed Kilgore’s post, “Class Warfare on Taxes Not Real Smart for Romney” at The Washington Monthly makes a point the GOP nominee’s wingnut amen corner has overlooked:
I understand that when Mitt Romney made his now-infamous comments about “the 47%” in Boca Raton months ago, he was not anticipating it all going public and becoming a major campaign issue. But since some (if not all) conservatives, including the Big Blowhard from just up the road in Palm Beach, are encouraging Mitt to “go with it,” it’s worth noting that there’s little or no evidence a class war on tax burdens would go real well for the GOP.
Kilgore quotes from Greg Sargent’s ‘Plum Line’ post noting that the public does not feel low-income people are under-taxed, nor that the wealthy pay too much. Kilgore adds that “Mitt Romney is the one presidential candidate in recent history who needs to stay far, far away from issues about the morality of various folks’ tax burdens.”
In the comments following Kilgore’s post, a commenter with the handle “c u n d gulag” piles on with a worthy addendum: “Every, and I mean EVERY, Democrat needs to say, “Mr. Romney, before you talk about the 47%ers, prove you ain’t one of ’em! SHOW US YOUR TAX RETURNS!!!.”
The following article, by democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
All through the Republican convention, all we heard from media pundits was how Romney needed to humanize himself, and clearly that was a major goal for their convention. They tried to do it a whole bunch of different ways: Ann Romney’s speech, stories from people who had known Romney over the years talking about what a great guy he was, warm and fuzzy videos, and Romney’s own speech, where he talked about his family and early days in business. None of it really worked very well; Romney still came off as stiff and robotic. Even walking down the aisle of the convention center, shaking hands with his most loyal supporters, he never looked comfortable.
Now, though, with the video that Mother Jones just broke, from the Romney meeting with his most elite, millionaire megadonors and fundraisers, we have finally seen the real Mitt Romney. Sounding relaxed, confident, and even impassioned at times, Romney showed what his true values and beliefs were and revealed the private man behind the public candidate.
Now we know why he looks so stiff in his public appearances: He really doesn’t want regular voters to see who he really is.
For 32 years now, I have been working on campaigns or with political leaders as a staffer, consultant, or informal adviser, and one of my most fundamental rules for successful campaigns is that a candidate needs to be who he or she is and not try to be something they aren’t, because voters will see through the phoniness most of the time. Most of the time, with decent people, whatever kind of people they are are can be turned into an asset on the campaign trail. Insider, outsider, wonky, funny, folksy, intense — voters look for different things in different candidates, and a lot of different ways of being can work. But the problem for Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan is that the values they hold, the kind of people they really are, is not something that is very appealing.
Romney and Ryan really do believe the things Romney said in the video. They really do think that the people not supporting them are lazy no-accounts who are dependent on government and who believe they are victims. And they really do think it is their job to not worry about those people, even if they believe about half of all Americans are such people.
And here’s the most interesting thing of all. Historically, most candidates who would get caught saying something even remotely as offensive as that would be apologizing and backtracking as quickly as they possibly could. “I was tired,” they might say; “It was out of context”; “I sincerely apologize for the misstatement.” But not Mitt: He is standing by what he said, allowing only that it was “inelegantly” phrased. As embarrassing as this statement is, he can’t back away, because this is what the Republican base completely believes, and he can’t afford to offend them.
This is the philosophy of Ayn Rand, whom Paul Ryan has acknowledged as the person who inspired his political beliefs, but clearly Romney believes in her philosophy, as well. It’s the philosophy that anyone not wealthy and successful, anyone who ever needs a hand up from the rest of us at any point in his or her life, is a leech on society and a moocher who steals from the virtuous. This includes anyone who gets any form of help from the government (except of course businesspeople, even though they use roads and bridges and airports and educated workers and tax subsidies), such as Social Security, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or Pell Grants, or student loans, or disability payments, or Head Start, or veterans’ benefits. It even includes, as Romney alluded to in his remarks to the millionaire supporters, unemployed people, and part-time workers, and students, and retirees too poor to pay income taxes (even if they do pay sales and property taxes and all kinds of fees).
They also believe, like Rand, that anyone who opposes these ideas, even if they are successful themselves, are “looters,” enablers of these parasites of society who don’t take responsibility for their lives. That’s why Romney believes that anyone supporting Obama is a bad person, someone who believes in dependency.
The Romney-Ryan-Rand philosophy is to have government serve the financially successful and take money away from the “moochers.” This is the real them, and they aren’t going to apologize for it. While I’m sure the Romney campaign is very unhappy that this video came out, because its brutal honesty about Romney’s values is so stark and off-message, they can’t back away, because it is what the modern Republican Party believes to its core.
These are not the values I was taught in Sunday school, and not the values that made this country great. The people who founded this nation, and those who built and held it together through all the trials and tribulations that came along in the 236 years to follow, knew that, as Ben Franklin said, we’d better all hang together or we’ll all hang separately. They knew, as Jefferson did, that we had to build schools and roads and bridges in order to build the country. They knew, as Lincoln did, that creating land-grant universities and giving poor people free land through the Homestead Act would add to America’s greatness. They knew, as Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt did, that sometimes the wealthy and powerful abused their power and needed to be reined in, and that sometimes the old and the poor needed to be given aid. And they knew, as Martin Luther King, Jr. did, that our fates are “inextricably linked in a garment of destiny.”
You know who else knew that the values Mitt Romney expressed in that video were wrong? That guy I learned about in Sunday school, the guy Romney and Ryan claim to be followers of. In the one time he actually talked about how people would be judged, Jesus of Nazareth said that when the nations — including ours, presumably — are assembled before him in the last judgment, he will decide their fate based on one thing: how they treated the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the prisoner, “the least of these.” If Mitt Romney’s and Paul Ryan’s values and policies are the ones we choose, I’m guessing this nation won’t fare so well in such a judgment.
…the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)
…The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable. It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.
For voters who pay attention to the daily news cycle, it is this dramatic glimpse of the “real Romney” that will be most destructive to his campaign. The elaborately constructed public persona – not only the Republican convention “nice guy with a sense of humor” (which virtually no-one believed anyway) but also the “tall, take-charge-guy with great hair and pseudo-Kennedyesque look of smart, competent leadership” (which the campaign has studiously promoted in all of Romney’s ads and public appearances), have all been revealed as media artifice.
The public Romney, it turns out, is an air-brushed, sanitized, focus-grouped, media-coached illusion. What lies beneath is, as Chait says, a “sneering plutocrat” of genuinely “sinister character,” a man who should be seen as a sincere ideological comrade-in-arms of Ayn Rand and Rush Limbaugh and a genuinely repugnant candidate for the presidency.
Richard Nixon’s carefully crafted public image collapsed when the Watergate tapes first revealed the genuinely vile, nasty, brutish man behind the public image. If the media presentation of the new video dramatizes the reality behind Romney’s public façade, it may actually play a similarly pivotal role in his downfall.
It’s pretty bad for the GOP when one of the America’s top conservative columnists feels compelled to blister the Republican nominee 7 weeks before the election. Responding to Romney’s comments (see post below) about nearly half of Americans being trapped in a culture of dependency, Brooks writes,
Romney, who criticizes President Obama for dividing the nation, divided the nation into two groups: the makers and the moochers… Romney’s comments also reveal that he has lost any sense of the social compact. In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62 percent of Republicans believed that the government has a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Republicans believe that.
The Republican Party, and apparently Mitt Romney, too, has shifted over toward a much more hyperindividualistic and atomistic social view — from the Reaganesque language of common citizenship to the libertarian language of makers and takers. There’s no way the country will trust the Republican Party to reform the welfare state if that party doesn’t have a basic commitment to provide a safety net for those who suffer for no fault of their own.
The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.
Brooks continues with a searing observation that “as a description of America today, Romney’s comment is a country-club fantasy. It’s what self-satisfied millionaires say to each other. It reinforces every negative view people have about Romney.” Brooks is also right that Romney is “running a depressingly inept campaign,” which many would agree bodes ill for his credibility as a potential leader of the free world.
John b. Judis’s post “Nobody Likes Mitt: The election is a popularity contest. And that’s OK.” at The New Republic has added resonance today, in the wake of Romney’s ill-considered comments that nearly half of Americans are “people who pay no income tax,” are “dependent upon government” and see themselves as “victims” who are “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Writing a few days before Romney’s latest blunder was outed, Judis noted:
…In public opinion surveys, what has jumped out for months is the large advantage that Obama enjoys over Romney on questions related to character and personality…In the same poll that Gallup found voters preferring Romney on the economy, it found that Obama enjoyed a 23 percentage-point edge on who is more “likeable,” a 16 point advantage in “who cares about the needs of people like you,” and a 12-point edge in who is more “honest and trustworthy.” Other polls show similar results. In four polls conducted from April 8 through September 9, The Washington Post and ABC found that voters by over two-to-one margins thought that Obama “seems the more friendly and likeable person.”
If the 2000 election had been decided entirely on specific policy grounds, Vice President Al Gore probably would have won fairly easily. But George W. Bush enjoyed a consistent edge on character questions. According to Gallup polls in October 2000, voters found Bush more likeable by 60 to 31 percent and more honest and trustworthy by 47 to 33 percent. In the 2004 election, Bush enjoyed a similar edge over challenger John Kerry. After the October 13 debate, CNN/Gallup found voters preferring Kerry on every measure except one: who was “more likeable.” Bush, not Kerry, went on to win the election.
It’s a good read. Pick it up here.
Despite the conservative argument that President Obama’s stimulus plan was an ineffective waste of money, new opinion data indicates that “the stimulus–whatever its flaws might have been–played an important role in keeping the economy from getting far worse than it did,” says TDS Co-Founder Ruy Teixeira. As Teixeira continues:
…In a new United Technologies/National Journal poll, respondents were given a description of the stimulus program–from the standpoint of both its supporters and its detractors–and asked how much they’d heard or seen about the program. Almost all (85 percent) had heard at least something about the stimulus.
Those who had heard at least something about the stimulus program were then asked whether the stimulus was the right or wrong thing to do for the country. A solid majority (55 percent) thought the stimulus program was the right thing to do.
The Romney and Republican meme that the stimulus failed to improve the economy has been broadly rejected. “In the public’s view, the stimulus may not have been perfect, but it was integral to helping our economy get back on track,” explains Teixeira.
At The New Republic, Nate Cohn has an encouraging observation: “…By Friday: we’ll be able to start assessing whether Obama’s post-DNC boost was a temporary bounce or a resilient bump…If Obama’s four point lead persists through the week, Obama should be considered a very strong favorite for reelection. While it might seem that the heart of the campaign is still to come, the candidate leading two weeks after the in-party convention has gone onto win the popular vote in every presidential election since Truman’s come from behind victory in 1948.”
More reason for Democratic high fives: “Obama has jumped out to an average lead of 3.1 percentage points in 10 national polls taken since Sept. 4. That’s triple the 1.1 percentage-point edge Obama held in polling conducted between Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate and the end of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla…Obama holds a lead in the polls in 11 of the 12 battleground states being contested by both candidates…The Republican nominee needs to capture at least eight of 12 swing states won four years ago by Obama to have a chance in an Electoral College,” according to according to Richard S. Dunham’s “Obama Leads in Electoral College Tallies” in the San Francisco Chronicle.
But Nate Silver takes a more sober view of recent polling data, putting unbridled optimism on hold until “Mr. Obama’s numbers hold at their present levels for another two weeks or so. Silver adds, “The forecast model is deliberately reading Mr. Obama’s polls a bit skeptically right now because we are still close enough to the conventions that there could be temporary effects from them.”
Hotline on Call reports that President Obama is in the ballpark, where he needs to be with white working-class voters: “Most notably, the national polls all showed the president at his target for reelection among white voters; Obama won 43 percent of whites in 2008 but is favored for reelection this year if he can clear roughly 39 percent. CNN/ORC showed Obama at 42 percent among whites, Fox News at 40 and ABC News/Washington Post at 41 percent. And a new poll from the Democratic outfit Democracy Corps showed Obama at 40 percent among whites without college degrees, the voters most resistant to the president in this campaign.”
Politico’s “Inside the campaign: How Mitt Romney stumbled” by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei is getting most of the ‘Romney Campaign in Disarray’ buzz, with it’s finger-pointing at Romney’s top strategist Stuart Stevens. Seems to me this lets the candidate off the hook for his blundering, which began well before the convention and continues afterward.
He looks like a good candidate, but isn’t it just a couple of months early?
At Bloomberg Businessweek, John McCormick’s “Romney Seeks to Blunt Obama Edge With Swing-State Latinos” reports that Romney is readying his pro-small business pitch to Latinos in battleground states, beginning with a speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. McCormick reports “The Romney campaign has run Spanish-language television ads targeting Hispanics, including one called “No podemos mas” — translated to “We no longer can” — that contrasts with Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan, “Yes, we can.” Limp.
Game on in NC, via early voting. Swing state IA begins this Saturday, along with half of the states.
Steve Kornacki reports at Salon.com on Elizabeth Warren taking the lead in the U.S. Senate race in MA in two new polls. Kornacki adds: “If the Warren-Brown race were for the governorship, an office that Massachusetts voters have been very willing to elect Republicans to in recent times, there’s little doubt that Brown would win. But because it’s for federal office, Warren has a better chance to harness the state’s aversion to the national GOP brand. We’ve seen a race like this before, when the very popular Republican Bill Weld – who was fresh of a gubernatorial reelection bid in which he racked up 71 percent of the vote – challenged John Kerry for the Senate in 1996. In a popularity contest, Weld would have won. But Massachusetts voters didn’t want to further empower Republicans in Washington, and Kerry survived by 7 points.”
This is a damn good — and important — question.
The following, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Al Gore once famously talked a lot about a lockbox for Social Security, and it would have been nice if we had kept one. But though no one has used the phrase in the 12 years since, in this presidential election we have a lockbox as well — or at least a locked box. It is the one Mitt Romney has to try to campaign in, and unless he figures a way out sometime soon, the drama in this election year may become more about whether Democrats can win back the House than whether Obama will be re-elected. Now don’t get me wrong: with the economy not out of the woods and the Super PAC slushfund money still pouring in, with debates coming that could change the dynamics, there is no taking this race for granted, and Democrats should be taking no breathers. But there will come a moment in early October where Karl Rove, the Chamber of Commerce, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and all those other sleazy big money boys are going to have to decide whether to keep gambling on propping Mitt up or whether he is too trapped in his lockbox to win. If they decide he can’t do it, we will see a sudden shift of Super PAC money into trying to save the Republican House.
The box Romney is locked into has been constructed by his own base. His base so thoroughly controls the party and the money and the echo chamber that Romney can’t move without stirring up a major internal brushfire. When he tries to appeal to Latino swing voters, he can’t talk about immigration, so Latinos are staying overwhelmingly with Obama. When the campaign tried to appeal to women in the Republican convention, they had to mostly focus the appeal on traditional stay at home moms, so now he’s losing unmarried women and working women by bigger and bigger numbers. When he tried to sound like a moderate on health care last Sunday, he was forced to pull back within hours. When he says something stupidly macho on foreign policy, he can’t afford to soften it or back down, so he has to double down and make himself look even more ridiculous.
It is a huge problem for Romney, as polls are showing. The polling is showing that Romney is running into a ceiling beyond which he can’t rise, and he can’t change course because his base would go ballistic and blow the whole campaign up. And now we’re getting close, and the dynamics in this race are hardening.
In the last three days I have seen seven polls showing the Obama lead at 7, 6, 6, 6, 5, 5, and 4. While there is also one outlier that has the margin at only one, I think it is safe to say that the President has opened up a real lead of about five points, which is the Democracy Corps number that just came out and I consider the most reliable. Given that (a) some of these polls were just finished and it is more than a week out from the convention, and (b) the bad publicity Romney has gotten over yet another not-ready-for-primetime foreign policy gaffe, it seems likely that the lead won’t fade much, maybe a point or two, over the next couple of weeks. It also seems likely that, absent some huge new development, at least through the first debate on Oct 3, the basic shape of this race is unlikely to change and Obama will be leading both nationally and in the swing states for a while.
That means certain really critical things. First, what I learned when I was on the targeting committee for the ’92 Clinton campaign is that when a presidential campaign is ahead it can force the other side into hard targeting decisions. Even with all of Romney’s money, their campaign may soon have to decide whether to cut their losses and stop playing in expensive states like PA and MI where they are several points behind. Once they start narrowing the field like that, it allows a focus of money by the Obama team that will make it hard to lose states where they have a narrow edge like Ohio and CO.
Second, it will mean bet-hedging by the big money guys investing heavily in Romney, which will narrow the money gap considerably. Big corporate interests have their favorite in Mitt Romney, but they sure do want to be able to talk to the Obama people, and in politics, even if it buys nothing else, contributions to fundraisers at least buy you a chance at conversation.
Third, with early voting, it is going to mean the Obama team can lock in a whole lot of votes before any dynamics start to shift. Early voting has already started in NC, and will begin before September closes in NH, MI, VA, and IA. It starts in FL and OH the day before that first debate. If we have a five point lead and Democrats feeling good about Obama, those early votes are a lot easier to put in the bank.
Finally, it means that the stakes for Romney in the first debate are enormous. If he goes into the debate 3-5 points behind and fails to score a big victory in the first debate, you know what is going to happen? Rove and all the big money boys are going to have a conversation that goes something like this: “Romney’s probably not going to make it no matter how much we spend, and Obama could have coattails. It’s time to switch our money to House races. Mark my words: if Romney loses that first debate, you swing state residents are going to see a lot fewer anti-Obama ads, and a lot more ads in your local House races.”
This election is far from over. The swing states are going to stay close; the economy will turn some swing voters away; there are hundreds of millions of dollars of ugly negative ads yet to come; gaffes and subpar debate performances and unforeseen world events could change a lot of things. We Democrats need to work our butts off to make sure we win, and this is a critical period — we can’t let up. But I would also urge my friends in the Democratic organizational, donor, blogger and activist community to be just as prepared for success as we are for tough turns in the presidential race: in this nationalized election, we could have a real shot in October of riding a 5-6 point Obama edge to a majority in the House. (I’m not mentioning the Senate because I feel extremely confident that if Obama is winning by five, we won’t have any problem keeping the Senate majority.) If that scenario is within range, we need to be ready to strike while the iron is hot, because Rove and the Koch’s and Adelson’s and all their friends will be moving their money tootsweet into House races.
The following is cross-posted from a DCorps e-blast:
President Obama emerged from his convention with the biggest lead of the year in our pollingand at 50 percent in the race. According to the latest national survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps, the President holds a 5-point lead on the ballot, up a net 3 points since just before the Republican convention. With the Romney campaign reeling on issues unrelated to the economy, the President enters the fall campaign in a much stronger position to sustain a lead, bolstered by the dynamics of the race. He has made gains among key groups in the progressive base, including unmarried women and young people and with key swing groupsclimbing above 40 percent among white voters and making gains with white non-college-educated voters.
If the two conventions set out to reach women, the President won hands down here, making major gains with both college-educated and non-college-educated women. Obama is ahead with white women, 50 to 46 percentan 18-point net gain since August.
And if the two conventions battled over Medicare and seniors, the President ended up with a 6-point advantage on who voters trust more on Medicare (with an 11-point advantage on intensity) and significant vote gains among seniors.
Key Findings:
Obama leads by 5 points on the ballot, 50 to 45 percent against Mitt Romney. All of the Presidents gains came with what we have called the Rising American Electorateyoung people, minorities, and unmarried womenthe new broad base for progressives. This was a base convention for Democrats whose base forms nearly half of the electorate. Obama is now winning 68 percent of unmarried women matching his 2008 level with this group.
Romneys running mate, Paul Ryan, is not helping the ticket. His personal rating has not improved in the three weeks since the Republican convention stuck in slightly negative territory.
The engagement gap. Nearly an equal number of Democrats and Republicans now say they are following the election very closely. But minorities, unmarried women, and particularly women, trail the electorate overall on this key measure.
Both candidates improved their personal images in the conventions, but Mitt Romney remains in negative territoryand he is running out of opportunities to change voters gut feelings about him. In our monthly tracking dating back to January 2011, Mitt Romney has yet to receive a net positive personal rating.
Obama makes gains, but the weak economy still helps Romney. Obama has narrowed Romneys advantage on the economy to a 2-point deficit, but that still creates downward pressure in the race. There is no improvement in the countrys economic mood, even if there is greater confidence in its leadership.
Read the full analysis at Democracy Corps.