Don't trust the polls
The Elephant in the Room
By ROSS DOUTHAT, NYT
If a polling lead in the first week of September were a guarantee of victory two months later, then John McCain and Al Gore would have both been sworn in as president of the United States. So no, President Obama's convention bounce has not - repeat, has not - sealed the election for the Democrats.
What the Obama bounce has done, though, is dramatically reduce the possibility that this election will turn out like 1980 or 1992, when the electorate broke hard against the incumbent in the last few months of the campaign. The convention period was Mitt Romney's best chance to pull substantially ahead of the president and set himself up to pull away. If Romney wins, it will probably be by a whisker, not a lap.
Judging by the last week's worth of conservative commentary, this post-convention reality - a narrower path to victory for Romney and a stronger likelihood of defeat - comes as a shock to many of his backers. Not that they expected an outright landslide, necessarily. But there's a strong consensus on the right that we should be headed for a much more decisive repudiation of this administration than the current polls suggest is possible.
"If the Republican Party cannot win in this environment," George Will told his fellow panelists on ABC's "This Week on Sunday," "it has to get out of politics." He was echoed by the popular radio host Laura Ingraham: "If you can't beat Barack Obama with this record," she told her listeners, "then shut down the party." Likewise the historian and prominent Romney backer Niall Ferguson, who told Newsweek's readers that Obama's robust poll numbers proved that "the law of political gravity has been suspended."
(More here.)
By ROSS DOUTHAT, NYT
If a polling lead in the first week of September were a guarantee of victory two months later, then John McCain and Al Gore would have both been sworn in as president of the United States. So no, President Obama's convention bounce has not - repeat, has not - sealed the election for the Democrats.
What the Obama bounce has done, though, is dramatically reduce the possibility that this election will turn out like 1980 or 1992, when the electorate broke hard against the incumbent in the last few months of the campaign. The convention period was Mitt Romney's best chance to pull substantially ahead of the president and set himself up to pull away. If Romney wins, it will probably be by a whisker, not a lap.
Judging by the last week's worth of conservative commentary, this post-convention reality - a narrower path to victory for Romney and a stronger likelihood of defeat - comes as a shock to many of his backers. Not that they expected an outright landslide, necessarily. But there's a strong consensus on the right that we should be headed for a much more decisive repudiation of this administration than the current polls suggest is possible.
"If the Republican Party cannot win in this environment," George Will told his fellow panelists on ABC's "This Week on Sunday," "it has to get out of politics." He was echoed by the popular radio host Laura Ingraham: "If you can't beat Barack Obama with this record," she told her listeners, "then shut down the party." Likewise the historian and prominent Romney backer Niall Ferguson, who told Newsweek's readers that Obama's robust poll numbers proved that "the law of political gravity has been suspended."
(More here.)
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