State of the Race – September 22 (Is this Election 47% over?)

Once again there has been another abun-dance of polling. Since last week's post, there have been 62 polls done in 20 different states, including 46 polls done in the 11 battleground states that I've identified previously. So with the new polling, here's the breakdown currently:

	Safe	Likely	Lean	Total
Obama	179	58	95	332
Romney	133	58	15	206
Tossup				0

If you want to see how I arrived at these categories, I would encourage you to review the first “State of the Race” post I did on August 11 which can be found here. If you want to see a visual breakdown of which side states fall on, see the photo above or click here for an interactive map. Unfortunately, I'm having a problem with the app that allowed me to create the maps with the degrees of where states fell. For a list of which states fall in which categories, I provide the following chart:

	Safe	Likely	Lean
Obama	CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NJ, NY, RI, VT, WA	MI, MN, NM, OR, PA	CO, FL, IA, NV, NH, OH, VA, WI
Romney	AL, AK, AR, GA, ID, KS, KY, LA, MS, NE, ND, OK, TX, UT, WV, WY	AZ, IN, MO, MT, SC, SD, TN	NC
Tossup

Here are the changes from last week: Connecticut and New Jersey moved from “Likely” Obama to “Safe” Obama while New Hampshire went the other direction moving from “Likely” Obama to “Lean” Obama. On Romney's side of the ledger Indiana moved from “Safe” Romney to “Likely” Romney, but the remainder of Romney's states stayed static. Finally, the other big change from last week is that we have no states in the “Tossup” category as Iowa moved from “Tossup” to “Lean” Obama. All in all, the race still remains very static as it relates to the state polling.

Last week, I talked about the fact that many commentators believe that much of the electorate has already made up their mind. Well this week came the revelation that Governor Romney has already concluded that 47% of the electorate has made up its mind that it will vote against him. The release of the video which caught Romney making these comments came at a horrible time for the Republican nominee. Romney's campaign had been in the process of trying reset their message to focus on the details of what he would do as president to help the ailing economy. Unfortunately for him, on the same day they were going to start rolling out this message, the video showed up where Romney says that 47% of the people would not vote for him since they do not pay taxes and “who believe that they are victims”. The remainder of the week ended up being Romney trying to either explain the comments, defend them or point to comments made by then state Senator Obama regarding redistribution of wealth. In other words, Governor Romney did not accomplish anything that he wanted to in reframing his message.

As for the video clip itself, the reason it does so much damage to Romney's campaign lies in an age old political adage that gaffes especially cause you problems when they reinforce a pre-existing image problem for that candidate. The same thing happened to President Obama earlier this summer when he made the comment about small business owners, saying that they “did not build that” making it seem like he was saying that business owners did not build their businesses nor were they responsible for any success. This only served to reinforce the belief that many have that President Obama is unfriendly to business. In Romney's case, his comments reinforce the image that many have that he is a rich guy who doesn't care about poor people or at a minimum, does not understand their struggles. In fact, I found the part of the quote that was most damaging to Romney to be when he said, “My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” This statement suggests that he doesn't fully appreciate the fact that most Americans whose incomes are low enough that they did not pay federal income tax are still responsible citizens who earn a living and pay their bills. In fact, many of the people who do not pay federal income tax do so because their deductions and tax credits allow them to avoid a tax liability not because they are dependent on the government.

Whether this poses an ongoing problem for Governor Romney or simply is a one-week distraction remains to be seen. However, some of the state polls that were done this week were being conducted in the middle of this controversy, so it would seem that this week's Electoral College breakdown might be the low point for the Romney campaign. In other words, I'm still convinced that this election will get closer. As we move forward and into the debates at the beginning of October, we'll see if these numbers hold or if things tighten as I anticipate. Next week, I'll do a preview of the debates and how the 2004 election might provide some guidance in how this election is proceeding.