Thursday, August 02, 2012 9:16:17 AM
Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Obama leads, Romney trails, foreign trip gaffes hurt
Thu Aug 02, 2012 at 04:24 AM PDT
by DemFromCTFollow for Daily Kos
Twitter now posts a "daily sentiment" index about the candidates. Watch what you say... literally.
National Journal:
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s gaffe-filled foreign trip did some political damage stateside, according to a poll from Conversation Nation, a joint project of National Journal and the survey research firm Keller Fay Group.
Negative conversations about the presumptive GOP nominee spiked at the end of last week, after Romney’s criticism of Britain’s handling of security at the Summer Olympics in London. The survey, which tracks word-of-mouth discussions among adults, found that on Sunday, 49 percent of conversations about Romney were negative, a 7 percentage-point spike from the previous day’s tracking. The survey works on a three-day rolling average.
Over the course of last week, 45 percent of word-of-mouth discussions about Romney were mostly negative while only 27 percent were positive. Discussions about President Obama, meanwhile, were split evenly at 40 percent.
Reuters:
But at a few U.S. universities, academics have boiled the art of prediction down to a dispassionate science. Some claim their forecasts in presidential elections -- typically issued months before Election Day -- have been more accurate than opinion polls taken the day before ballots are cast.
Plugging decades of data into spreadsheets, they calculate everything from how much a bad economy is hurting an incumbent to how the results of New Hampshire's presidential primaries, conducted 10 months before an election, can signal who the eventual winner will be in November.
"What this forecasting really amounts to is quantitative history," said James Campbell, a political scientist at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.
So far this year, forecasters in line with many current opinion polls see Obama squeaking out a victory over Romney.
In a Reuters poll of nine leading forecasters, the median prediction was for Obama to win 50.5 percent of the vote. Although under the complicated American system, that would not necessarily mean victory because the winner is determined by the state Electoral College results.
In 2008, the median forecast of the same group, which estimated that Obama would receive 52 percent of the vote compared with Republican John McCain's 48 percent, was about as close to the election results as Gallup's final poll from the last three days of the presidential campaign.
Jonathan Capehart:
Mitt Romney should be running away with this election. As I explained in my earlier post, the economy isn’t doing the American people or President Obama any favors. Yet, the presumptive Republican nominee running on his business experience and his promise to right what he says are the misguided policies of the incumbent is running behind in the latest battleground poll. Basically, Romney has a credibility problem. One that only he can solve. One that he doesn’t seem capable of solving.
WaPo:
Mitt Romney started this campaign with a problem: an image as a wealthy elitist, out of touch with middle-class life.
New polls out Wednesday show that — even now, after months of campaigning and an expensive effort to introduce himself to voters — Romney still hasn’t overcome that first impression.
Roger Simon:
Maybe Mitt Romney should have just stayed in London and watched the dancing horses.
Or just stayed home. Even though his recent trip to England was largely a public relations disaster, he made a more serious mistake in his next stop, Israel, and got a major rebuff in his last stop, Poland.
National Journal:
The sharp-elbowed fight reveals an important facet of the contest for the White House: Even if voters care far more about jobs and the deficit, other policy debates can still be influential if they shape how people perceive the candidate's character. In other words, voters might not care directly about how Romney would treat the rest of the world, but they'll worry if he can be portrayed as overwhelmed by overseas challenges.
That, in fact, has been the Obama campaign's tack. A trip that should have been perfunctory for a presidential nominee has elicited fierce blowback, first from the British authorities and later from Palestinians. As former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel put it, Romney "made a mess of being a tourist."
"At every level, this trip has shown more of how Mitt Romney is not ready for the Oval Office," Emanuel said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
EJ Dionne:
The Obamians are realistic about the fact that they need a significant share of the white working-class vote — and that Clinton is a better messenger for this group than the president is. My rule of thumb is that if Obama can hold Romney’s lead down to about 15 percent in the white working-class, he is almost certain to win.
Bill Clinton appeals to these voters (as Hillary Clinton did in the 2008 primaries).
Politico on Obama's attack on Romney's tax policy:
“But here’s the thing – he’s not asking you to contribute more to pay down the deficit, or to invest in our kids’ education," Obama adds. "He’s asking you to pay more so that people like him can get a tax cut.”
The report, released Wednesday, finds "it is not mathematically possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that preserves current incentives for savings and investment and that does not result in a net tax cut for high-income taxpayers and a net tax increase for lower- and/or middle-income taxpayers.”
The new Romney ad on the auto bailout is so bad, he even does the impossible... he loses Jennifer Rubin.
In short, I don’t get the point of the ad. It seems to be written for the Obama campaign team and not the voters. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being Reagan’s “Morning in America,” this is a 2. Maybe a 1.
Note to media: Romney's campaign team isn't as good as Obama's. It's okay to say it.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/02/1115693/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up-Obama-leads-Romney-trails-foreign-trip-gaffes-hurt
Thu Aug 02, 2012 at 04:24 AM PDT
by DemFromCTFollow for Daily Kos
Twitter now posts a "daily sentiment" index about the candidates. Watch what you say... literally.
National Journal:
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s gaffe-filled foreign trip did some political damage stateside, according to a poll from Conversation Nation, a joint project of National Journal and the survey research firm Keller Fay Group.
Negative conversations about the presumptive GOP nominee spiked at the end of last week, after Romney’s criticism of Britain’s handling of security at the Summer Olympics in London. The survey, which tracks word-of-mouth discussions among adults, found that on Sunday, 49 percent of conversations about Romney were negative, a 7 percentage-point spike from the previous day’s tracking. The survey works on a three-day rolling average.
Over the course of last week, 45 percent of word-of-mouth discussions about Romney were mostly negative while only 27 percent were positive. Discussions about President Obama, meanwhile, were split evenly at 40 percent.
Reuters:
But at a few U.S. universities, academics have boiled the art of prediction down to a dispassionate science. Some claim their forecasts in presidential elections -- typically issued months before Election Day -- have been more accurate than opinion polls taken the day before ballots are cast.
Plugging decades of data into spreadsheets, they calculate everything from how much a bad economy is hurting an incumbent to how the results of New Hampshire's presidential primaries, conducted 10 months before an election, can signal who the eventual winner will be in November.
"What this forecasting really amounts to is quantitative history," said James Campbell, a political scientist at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.
So far this year, forecasters in line with many current opinion polls see Obama squeaking out a victory over Romney.
In a Reuters poll of nine leading forecasters, the median prediction was for Obama to win 50.5 percent of the vote. Although under the complicated American system, that would not necessarily mean victory because the winner is determined by the state Electoral College results.
In 2008, the median forecast of the same group, which estimated that Obama would receive 52 percent of the vote compared with Republican John McCain's 48 percent, was about as close to the election results as Gallup's final poll from the last three days of the presidential campaign.
Jonathan Capehart:
Mitt Romney should be running away with this election. As I explained in my earlier post, the economy isn’t doing the American people or President Obama any favors. Yet, the presumptive Republican nominee running on his business experience and his promise to right what he says are the misguided policies of the incumbent is running behind in the latest battleground poll. Basically, Romney has a credibility problem. One that only he can solve. One that he doesn’t seem capable of solving.
WaPo:
Mitt Romney started this campaign with a problem: an image as a wealthy elitist, out of touch with middle-class life.
New polls out Wednesday show that — even now, after months of campaigning and an expensive effort to introduce himself to voters — Romney still hasn’t overcome that first impression.
Roger Simon:
Maybe Mitt Romney should have just stayed in London and watched the dancing horses.
Or just stayed home. Even though his recent trip to England was largely a public relations disaster, he made a more serious mistake in his next stop, Israel, and got a major rebuff in his last stop, Poland.
National Journal:
The sharp-elbowed fight reveals an important facet of the contest for the White House: Even if voters care far more about jobs and the deficit, other policy debates can still be influential if they shape how people perceive the candidate's character. In other words, voters might not care directly about how Romney would treat the rest of the world, but they'll worry if he can be portrayed as overwhelmed by overseas challenges.
That, in fact, has been the Obama campaign's tack. A trip that should have been perfunctory for a presidential nominee has elicited fierce blowback, first from the British authorities and later from Palestinians. As former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel put it, Romney "made a mess of being a tourist."
"At every level, this trip has shown more of how Mitt Romney is not ready for the Oval Office," Emanuel said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
EJ Dionne:
The Obamians are realistic about the fact that they need a significant share of the white working-class vote — and that Clinton is a better messenger for this group than the president is. My rule of thumb is that if Obama can hold Romney’s lead down to about 15 percent in the white working-class, he is almost certain to win.
Bill Clinton appeals to these voters (as Hillary Clinton did in the 2008 primaries).
Politico on Obama's attack on Romney's tax policy:
“But here’s the thing – he’s not asking you to contribute more to pay down the deficit, or to invest in our kids’ education," Obama adds. "He’s asking you to pay more so that people like him can get a tax cut.”
The report, released Wednesday, finds "it is not mathematically possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that preserves current incentives for savings and investment and that does not result in a net tax cut for high-income taxpayers and a net tax increase for lower- and/or middle-income taxpayers.”
The new Romney ad on the auto bailout is so bad, he even does the impossible... he loses Jennifer Rubin.
In short, I don’t get the point of the ad. It seems to be written for the Obama campaign team and not the voters. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being Reagan’s “Morning in America,” this is a 2. Maybe a 1.
Note to media: Romney's campaign team isn't as good as Obama's. It's okay to say it.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/02/1115693/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up-Obama-leads-Romney-trails-foreign-trip-gaffes-hurt
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