Who Will Win The Presidency?
Updated: 11:01am UK, Monday 05 November 2012
By Adam Boulton, Political Editor
In predicting who is going to be the next US president, all we have to go on are the opinion polls - the rest comes down to hunches and conscious or unconscious prejudice.
What's more, opinion polls in America are particularly unreliable. Polling just a few thousand people in a country where around 140 million are expected to vote is a risky business.
In many polls the margin of error, typically plus or minus 3%, is much bigger than the arithmetical 'lead' enjoyed by the top candidate.
There are also differences in the representative sample used by the pollsters. For example, that venerable organisation Gallup seems consistently to favour the Republicans by as much as 6% more than its rivals in national opinion polls.
As things stand, national opinion polls are mostly a dead heat, when a margin of error is allowed for.
Mr Obama's popularity declined after his poor performance in the debate on October 3 and he has not recovered his big lead since then. But Mr Romney had no "momentum" by the beginning of November.
At the weekend, the RealClearPolitics (RCP) National Poll Average stood at 47.5% for Mr Obama and 47.3% for Mr Romney.
Mr Obama is clearly not on course to do as well as he did in 2008 against John McCain when he polled 52.9% of votes cast, compared to 45.7% for the Republican.
Indeed conventional wisdom has now placed at least two of the states he won then - Indiana and North Carolina - firmly in the Republican column.
National opinion polls reflect the popular vote across the country, and winning that is not how you get to be president. You win the election by winning the vote state by state, thus stacking up the majority of the 538 electoral college votes.
It's perfectly possible to win the popular vote and lose the electoral college. That's what Al Gore did against George W Bush in 2000. And it's what some Republicans fear Mr Romney may do this time.
So to work out who is going to sleep in the White House next January, you need to follow the state polls.
Working from this data, America's leading analysts have come up with different snapshots of the state of the electoral race.
With 270 college votes needed to win, RCP allocates 201 to Mr Obama, 191 to Mr Romney and 146 votes in 11 states to play for.
Calling states on a solid and leaning basis, the Washington Post gives Mr Obama 243 electoral votes, Mr Romney 181, with 89 up for grabs in the toss up states - Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, Iowa and New Hampshire.
Nate Silver at the New York Times' controversial FiveThirtyEight blog makes a different probability-based analysis of the same polling data.
He says there is now an 85.1% chance of Mr Obama being re-elected compared to just 14.9% that Mr Romney will become the 45th POTUS. He calculates final electoral vote share at 306.9 for Mr Obama compared to 231.1 for Mr Romney.
You get a similar result if you apply the latest state polls to the toss-up states in the Washington Post and RCP models. With two days to go these state polls do not point to a dead heat - they suggest that Mr Obama is going to be re-elected.
In the latest polls from most of the swing states - Wisconsin, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Virginia and above all Ohio - the President is ahead, not by much but consistently. He has also edged ahead in Florida, where he held his biggest rally on Sunday.
The Romney campaign shifted its focus to Pennsylvania at the weekend, in an attempt to suggest that more states than the usual suspects may be in play. But here and in Minnesota and Michigan, which the Republicans are also citing, the latest polls are also against them.
David Axelrod, Mr Obama's campaign chief, has promised to shave off his moustache if the President loses any of these three.
So why is there such confidence among Republicans that their man will win? Basically they say the opinion polls are wrong - and they point to surveys of early voting which show that Mr Obama's support amongst key voters is well down on 2008.
This argument, best articulated by George W Bush's old aide Karl Rove in the Wall St Journal, says the pollsters are over-representing democrats in their samples. On the ground they say Democrats are de-motivated to vote, while Republicans are fired up, and independents are breaking their way.
No wonder so many pundits are sitting on the fence, pointing out that this is a very close race according to the polls - with Mr Obama's edge in most circumstances in the margins of error.
Those who are making a guess, have to fall back on hunches and rules of thumb.
There are plenty of personal bellwethers to choose from.
No president since Franklin D Roosevelt has ever been re-elected with unemployment this high (although at 7.9% it is only a tenth of a per cent above the level where they have been returned).
At the start of the campaign, 25% of the electorate said the would never vote for a Mormon.
"As goes Ohio, so goes the nation" is pretty good but not infallible, but it is the case that no Republican has ever won without carrying what pundits insist on calling the Buckeye [i.e. Conker] State.
Then there are the lessons from recent history.
Incumbent presidents generally have some squatter's advantage. In modern times the only two incumbent presidents denied re-election have been George Bush senior and Jimmy Carter. But both had stronger negatives against them than Mr Obama.
Mr Bush's 1988 election pledge "read my lips no new taxes" was a demonstrable lie by 1992, while in 1980 Mr Carter was humiliated by American hostages held in Iran and a disastrous military mission to rescue them.
In contrast, Mr Obama presided over the killing of Osama bin Laden, economic indicators are at last moving in the right direction, and he's enjoyed high approval and endorsement in the past week for his handling of Hurricane Sandy.
It's also the case that the more charismatic candidate tends to win the presidency. Mr Carter outshone Gerald Ford but was put in the shade by Ronald 'Morning in America' Reagan; the reserved George Walker Bush was no match for 'Slick Willy' Clinton.
This year, by common consent, Mr Obama has the star power although Mr Romney is making the best of his buttoned-up big businessman demeanour.
Fifty-one-year-old Mr Obama is playing the man of the people: most often open-necked, shouting till he is hoarse and allowing himself the occasional blunt epithet such as "bull****er" about his opponent.
A well-preserved 65-year-old Mr Romney presents more formally as a president in waiting, he's even had his campaign plane painted to look like Air Force One. He's less inclined to dive into the crowd and typically delivers more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger pep talks about the state of Mr Obama's nation. A bit like the harangues most managers subject their employees to these days.
There is also a clear choice between the two men's visions of America - although both claim they are the man to unite the country across the political divide.
Arguing "we are all in this together" Mr Obama argues that government has a role in directing the country, the rich he says, need to contribute more.
Mr Romney champions the private sector, volunteers and individuals. He argues that lower taxes, even for the better off, will benefit all.
So who do I think will win?
I think it's unlikely that all the polls are as wrong as they would have to be for a Republican victory.
I note that the Republicans are under-performing in their ambitions for the US Congress - unlikely to take control of the Senate and set to lose a few seats in the House.
It also seems to me that the Republican Party is a house divided against itself. With powerful voices on the right such as the Tea Party pulling it a long way from the centrist ground which saw Mr Nixon, Mr Reagan and even the Bushes first elected. If Mr Romney is elected, I suspect that the internal rows are only just beginning. Swing voters don't like divided parties.
Shifts in the US population do not favour Republicans - if this was a 'whites only' election Mr Romney would be home and dry. But as the Republican Senator Linsey Graham quipped this summer: "We are not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."
Disappointment yes, almost everywhere, but I don't detect widespread anger and contempt for Mr Obama. The mood seems more about pressing on in hard times. A mood which may well have been strengthened by the travails of Hurricane Sandy in this closing week.
So my guess is that the President will be re-elected taking Ohio and probably Florida. But it is only a guess, America has two credible leaders to take it forward.
But most of the real votes have not been cast yet in spite of early polling, and they won't be until Tuesday.
Paddy Power is already paying out on an Obama victory. If you've got a bet on, my advice is to get down to the bookies ASAP.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Obama And Romney In Final White House Push
Dengan url
http://terjunbebasopan.blogspot.com/2012/11/obama-and-romney-in-final-white-house.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Obama And Romney In Final White House Push
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Obama And Romney In Final White House Push
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar