SMRs and AMRs

Friday, July 13, 2012

Where Romney and Obama are similar

Tribes of the Swing States 

By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT

What’s little known, and certainly unmentioned on the campaign trail, is what Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have in common. Both have family histories with polygamy. Both had fathers born in foreign countries. Both went to Harvard. Both are wealthy.

Taken together, it’s a narrow niche; there aren’t enough rich Harvard grads with multiple-wife family albums and a bit of foreign otherness to fill the car elevators in Romney’s beach manse.

Which leaves both candidates working the margins of different demographic fields. Mormons and African-Americans are taken. Same with passionate liberals and fist-pumping conservatives. The rural vote is pretty much all Romney’s, and urban hearts belong to Obama.

Romney can count on the often inchoate grudge block, people who vote against somebody, rather than for — a large part of the Republican base this year. Obama has certainly angered Wall Street, Southern whites and no small amount of conservative Roman Catholics.

(More here.)

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