The Latest View from One Prudential Plaza: Why the Obama Campaign Is (Still) So Confident About Beating Romney

By Mark Halperin, TIME, October 24, 2012

47% is probably the most famous number to come out of the 2012 presidential campaign. That’s the percentage of Americans Mitt Romney suggested he was writing off when captured on that famous secretly recorded video during a Florida fundraiser.

But 47% also represents the critical dividing line between how the Romney and Obama campaigns gauge the President’s chances of re-election, viewed through the prisms of their closely guarded internal polling data. In general, the Republicans see a ceiling of around 47% for Obama’s share of the vote in most of the nine battleground states that will decide this contest. The Obama team says it consistently measures their man above that magic line, at around 48-50%.

Both campaigns employ top-flight pollsters who are paid to scientifically take the pulse of the electorate in the battleground states and deliver to the candidate and his strategists an unvarnished view of the state of the race at any given moment. It doesn’t well serve either the incumbent or the challenger to sugarcoat the situation by producing poll results that overstate support (as some pollsters are famous for doing). The key differential between the Chicago and Boston methodologies appears to be assumptions about the final makeup of the electorate in the nine battleground contests.

If the President’s internal data is correct, he is indeed likely to win, pushing off a floor above 47%; using his superior get-out-the-vote operation to dominate early and absentee voting and hold his own on Election Day; and taking a significant share of the small remaining undecided vote. These numbers apply to Chicago’s data from the battleground states, where the President’s support in his campaign’s internal research has consistently outperformed his national poll standing.

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