While it's not overt 'till its over...this is very encouraging. To view all of the bar charts and line graphs, follow the link at the bottom. But they will make your eyes water. The headline is enough for me.
FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR
Why I Think Obama Is Toast
Dan McLaughlin (Diary) |
Barack Obama is toast. This is not something I say lightly. I generally try to remain cautious about predictions, because the prediction business is a humbling one. I have never been especially bullish on Mitt Romney, and I spent most of the summer and early fall arguing that this was basically a neck-and-neck race that would go down to the wire. But in the end, two things stand out:
One, Mitt Romney has a consistent, significant lead among independent voters, which increasingly looks like a double-digit lead. This is especially clear in national polls, but can also be seen in the key swing state polls. It’s been a hard enough number for the past few weeks now, even as the last of the debates gets baked into the polls, that there’s little chance that Obama can turn it around in the 11 days remaining in this race. In fact, Obama has been underwater with independents almost continuously since the middle of 2009.
Two, to overcome losing independents by more than a few points, Obama needs to have a decisive advantage in Democratic turnout, roughly on the order of – or in some places exceeding – the advantage he enjoyed in 2008, when Democrats nationally had a 7-point advantage (39-32). Yet nearly every indicator we have of turnout suggests that, relative to Republicans, the Democrats are behind where they were in 2008. Surveys by the two largest professional pollsters, Rasmussen and Gallup, actually suggest that Republicans will have a turnout advantage, which has happened only once (in the 2002 midterms) in the history of exit polling and probably hasn’t happened in a presidential election year since the 1920s.
Independents’ Day
Three types of people vote: Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. Traditionally, Republican candidates get in the vicinity of 90% of the votes of Republicans, and Democrats (for a variety of reasons) get a similar but perhaps slightly smaller percent of the votes of Democrats. This is more or less true over time and in national and state races. In 2010, Republicans carried Republican voters 95-4, Democrats carried Democratic voters 92-7, a 3-point Republican advantage. Absent an unusually large number of party crossovers, then, there are two paths to winning an election: win the remaining, Independent voters; or turn out more of your own.
It is usually the case that if you want to know who is winning an election, you look at who is winning independent voters. This chart, for example, shows the popular vote totals for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates from 1972-2008, juxtaposed with their share of independent voters. As you can see, while the relationship isn’t a perfect one (Bush narrowly won independents while narrowly losing the popular vote in 2000, and narrowly lost independents while winning the popular vote in 2004; a lot of independents also voted for third party candidates in 1980, 1992 and 1996), independent voters tend to mirror the trend of the electorate as a whole. This is not surprising: year to year, the preferences of independent voters tend to be a good deal more volatile than the partisan composition of the R/D portion of the electorate.
Conclusion
The waterfront of analyzing all the factors that go into my conclusion here is too large to cover in one post, but the signs of Obama’s defeat are too clear now to ignore. Given all the available information – Romney’s lead among independents, the outlier nature of the 2008 turnout model, the elections held since 2008, the party ID surveys, the voter registration, early voting and absentee ballot data – I have to conclude that there is no remaining path at this late date for Obama to win the national popular vote. He is toast.
Obama’s partisans have argued that he doesn’t need to; that he can pursue the rare path of winning key swing states without a national win. Time permitting, I’ll come back later to why I don’t think this flies if you take a close look at the state-by-state polling using the same assumptions about turnout and independent voters. But I don’t buy that either.
Mitt Romney will be the 45th President of the United States.
http://www.redstate.com/2012/10/26/why-i-think-obama-is-toast/
Barack Obama is toast. This is not something I say lightly. I generally try to remain cautious about predictions, because the prediction business is a humbling one. I have never been especially bullish on Mitt Romney, and I spent most of the summer and early fall arguing that this was basically a neck-and-neck race that would go down to the wire. But in the end, two things stand out:
One, Mitt Romney has a consistent, significant lead among independent voters, which increasingly looks like a double-digit lead. This is especially clear in national polls, but can also be seen in the key swing state polls. It’s been a hard enough number for the past few weeks now, even as the last of the debates gets baked into the polls, that there’s little chance that Obama can turn it around in the 11 days remaining in this race. In fact, Obama has been underwater with independents almost continuously since the middle of 2009.
Two, to overcome losing independents by more than a few points, Obama needs to have a decisive advantage in Democratic turnout, roughly on the order of – or in some places exceeding – the advantage he enjoyed in 2008, when Democrats nationally had a 7-point advantage (39-32). Yet nearly every indicator we have of turnout suggests that, relative to Republicans, the Democrats are behind where they were in 2008. Surveys by the two largest professional pollsters, Rasmussen and Gallup, actually suggest that Republicans will have a turnout advantage, which has happened only once (in the 2002 midterms) in the history of exit polling and probably hasn’t happened in a presidential election year since the 1920s.
Those two facts alone caused me to conclude at the end of last week that Obama will lose – perhaps lose a very close race, but lose just the same. That conclusion is only underscored by the fact that, historically, there is little reason to believe that the remaining undecided voters will break for an incumbent in tough economic times. He will lose the national popular vote, and the fact that he has remained competitive to the end in the two key swing states he needs to win (Ohio and Wisconsin) will not save him.
Independents’ Day
Three types of people vote: Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. Traditionally, Republican candidates get in the vicinity of 90% of the votes of Republicans, and Democrats (for a variety of reasons) get a similar but perhaps slightly smaller percent of the votes of Democrats. This is more or less true over time and in national and state races. In 2010, Republicans carried Republican voters 95-4, Democrats carried Democratic voters 92-7, a 3-point Republican advantage. Absent an unusually large number of party crossovers, then, there are two paths to winning an election: win the remaining, Independent voters; or turn out more of your own.
It is usually the case that if you want to know who is winning an election, you look at who is winning independent voters. This chart, for example, shows the popular vote totals for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates from 1972-2008, juxtaposed with their share of independent voters. As you can see, while the relationship isn’t a perfect one (Bush narrowly won independents while narrowly losing the popular vote in 2000, and narrowly lost independents while winning the popular vote in 2004; a lot of independents also voted for third party candidates in 1980, 1992 and 1996), independent voters tend to mirror the trend of the electorate as a whole. This is not surprising: year to year, the preferences of independent voters tend to be a good deal more volatile than the partisan composition of the R/D portion of the electorate.
Conclusion
The waterfront of analyzing all the factors that go into my conclusion here is too large to cover in one post, but the signs of Obama’s defeat are too clear now to ignore. Given all the available information – Romney’s lead among independents, the outlier nature of the 2008 turnout model, the elections held since 2008, the party ID surveys, the voter registration, early voting and absentee ballot data – I have to conclude that there is no remaining path at this late date for Obama to win the national popular vote. He is toast.
Obama’s partisans have argued that he doesn’t need to; that he can pursue the rare path of winning key swing states without a national win. Time permitting, I’ll come back later to why I don’t think this flies if you take a close look at the state-by-state polling using the same assumptions about turnout and independent voters. But I don’t buy that either.
Mitt Romney will be the 45th President of the United States.
http://www.redstate.com/2012/10/26/why-i-think-obama-is-toast/
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