The Obama campaign envisions that the minority vote (if they can find a way to vote with all the Voter ID laws) will be about 28% this year and they hope to take 80% of it. Democrats now average roughly 38% of the white vote, with John Kerry having done slightly better. A new census number is quite remarkable--15% of all new marriages are interracial, making the President the demographic of the future.
So we come to Willard. Willard is about to nuke Santorum in Michigan with a 29 to 1 money bomb on ads. Willard yesterday to the larger media said he would have bailed out the auto industry but on the stump he tried to win the tea party crowd by swing he would not have. He released an ad of him driving a Chrysler 300 around Detroit. Slight problem--that make was built in Canada.
On the Last Word last night, Howard Fineman raised the interesting point that ,with the possible exception of Hubert Humphrey in 1968,no presidential nominee has run in a general election with an unfavorable rating of higher than 50%. Willard is roughly at 55% and Gingrich is at an awesome 60% unfavorable rating.
The question here is whether this is the result of the nasty ad campaigns or the extended primary process among Republicans. Since unfavorable ratings are not the same as job approval ratings can they actually be reversed in time for the general election? For instance, as this blog has always noted that even at low ratings President Obama had huge personal favorable ratings, which has been his hidden political capital. These were maintained as he was being accused of everything from being a socialist to secret Muslim.
The Washington Monthly , first under Steve Benen and now under new editors, have chronicled Mitt Romney's almost Nixonian problem with the truth. Is this hurting him or is the perception that he is too rich to be President? In analyzing the primary results so far, it appears that the non-Mitt wins every income group below $250,000 a year and Mitt wins the wealthier Republicans. Nate Silver did a brief analysis of what this would mean in the general election for President Obama. If President Obama loses 10% of the upper class to Romney, he could gain 10% and more among those earning the average income. In many states, this would improve his situation, not hurt it.
Rachel Maddow last night did a short segment on the type of story that she excels at. This was on the probability that Willard may not have won the Maine caucus. She noted that the reversal of the Iowa Caucus was the first time in modern politics that a state reversed itself. But that Maine might be the second. What is clear from her reporting was that the Maine Republican party leadership did not play straight with the county chairman. The Waldo County chairman phoned in his results for 17 to 18 towns in the county and was told the party already had the results. When the party announced that his county voted for Romney the county chairman protested since those were not the results and the party then put up a big "0" for the results. The same happened in Kennebec, which should have gone for Romney but apparently really didn't. They got a big "0". The Party assured Washington County, which postponed its caucus because of a snowstorm, that its vote would count but they have since backed away from this. As I noted in a previous post, the results would not make a difference to the announced results but the Maine reporter on Rachel Maddow made a good point that with the national attention on the county now the turnout should be substantially higher and could upend the results. Stay tuned.
Why is this obscure story important? It is because the Maine "win" for Romney and his winning his first-ever CPAC poll reversed the media narrative of Romney The Loser. A few days later Romney operatives admitted they stacked the CPAC poll by buying up tickets to the conference. What happens if Main is forced to change its results?
Meanwhile, a local poll has Santorum with a 34-30 lead over Romney in one of his home states--the others are New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Utah and California. I will get to Santorum and some of his antics in the future.
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