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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Political Strategy Notes

UAW President Bob King weighs in with a USA Today op-ed, “Romney’s auto mess shows he is not ready.” Says King: “This is the real Romney, a man who objected to the rescue of the domestic auto industry, then made astronomical profits after his business partners threatened the survival of GM. A man who lies about Chrysler moving jobs to China, when his history at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, shows that he has invested in Chinese factories where workers are grossly exploited. Romney won’t even act to stop the Sensata factory in Illinois, in which he is an investor, from closing the doors and moving to China the day before the election…That is the picture of a me-first hedge-fund investor, not someone who has the judgment or character to be President of the United States.”
What the final skeds of the presidential candidates say about their closing strategies.
Jennifer Steinhauer of NYT’s ‘The Caucus’ flags “10 House Races to Watch,” noting “While there are more than 10 competitive races, some of them even closer than the ones we have listed list here, these House races are 10 worth watching.” They are: CA 15 and 36; CO 6; FL 18; IL 17; IA 3; GA 12; MA 6; NY 27; and UT 4.
At the Crystal Ball, Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik are more confident that Dems will hold the senate than the white house.
But Robert Schlesinger reports at U.S. News that Nate Silver estimates at this point about 294+ electoral votes for Obama, while other forecasters also see an E.V. edge for Obama: “The Princeton Election Consortium, run by Professor Sam Wang, projects Obama pulling in 303 electoral votes, for example; Votamatic, which is run by Drew Linzer, a professor at Emory and Stanford, predicts 332 electoral votes for Obama; Real Clear Politics’s “No Toss Up States” map gives Obama 281 electoral votes. (Huffington Post’s Pollster.com gives Obama a base of 253 electoral votes and leads in five of toss-up states as compared with 206 electoral votes and a single toss-up state lead for Romney.) And the major online betting markets all give Obama pretty good odds of re-election (Intrade puts it at 63.3 percent chance, and Betfair says 68 percent).”
WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains why Democrats will remain the more pro-compromise party: “To hold their Senate majority, Democrats need to keep winning in smaller and rural states that lean Republican. Republicans almost everywhere — Brown is the exception — now live in fear of losing primaries to tea party candidates such as Mourdock…Thus is compromise on the ballot next week. But only one side seems genuinely interested in reaching it.”
But the latest Associated Press-GfK poll indicates “Almost half of likely voters, 47 percent, think the Republican challenger would be better at ending the logjam, compared with 37 percent for Obama.” Further, “about 1 out of 6 likely voters didn’t take a side on the gridlock issue: 6 percent weren’t sure who would do a better job at getting Washington moving and 10 percent didn’t trust either man to break the impasse among congressional partisans.”
Steve Bousquet of the Tampa Bay Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau notes the rather sudden disappearance of FL Gov. Rick Scott from Romney campaign events and quotes Republican political scientist Darryl Paulson: “I think it is prudent to stay arm’s length from anyone in the party who might alienate the few undecided voters who are left.”
At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky has some good tips for President Obama in the closing days of the election, including: “Florida? Let Joe Biden and Bill Clinton take care of south Florida. The alter kockers are more their crowd. Obama needs to hit the I-4 corridor, where the white swing voters and the Puerto Ricans (and plenty enough African Americans) live, with a huge weekend rally, probably in Tampa. He carried Tampa’s Hillsborough County 50-48 last time, and if he can replicate that, he has a shot at Florida, which would crush Romney.”
Andy Kroll reports at Mother Jones on MoveOn’s use of 12 million “voter report cards” in battleground states, grading voters on how often they have voted in the past — and comparing their grade with the average of their neighbors. The technique is credited with helping Democrat Michael Bennet win in the 2010 Senate race in Colorado.

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