Why Mitt Romney will lose the election

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President Barack Obama will win a second term on November 6, 2012.

by Georgia Logothetis*

Yes, there are a couple of weeks left in the campaign and millions to be spent over those last few weeks on television ads and field programs. Yes, there will be a slew of debates between now and Election Day (though debates rarely move poll numbers).

The fact is that the Republican nominee has such a slim path to victory he may as well be walking a tightrope wearing clown shoes.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

After all, most political pundits live by the "50% rule," an axiom that any incumbent polling below 50% is in dire straits (Mr. Obama's approval is just under 50%). Unemployment is high, and the economy has yet to gain back the jobs shed under the Bush administration. By all traditional measures of candidate viability, the president should be losing. He isn't. In fact, he just might win by a blowout.

The post-convention bounce enjoyed by all candidates has not been fleeting for Mr. Obama. Rather, his lead appears to be growing week by week. While the national level polling averages portray a close race -- giving the president a slim lead of 1 or 2 points outside of the margin of error -- the reality is that polls in the battleground states paint an ugly picture for Mitt Mr. Romney. In the handful of swing states that will decide the election, Mr. Romney has seen his numbers plummet. Poll after poll over the last week has shown the president enjoying an average lead of ten points in those key battleground states.

At a time when many Americans are worried about their job security and feel like the system is rigged against them, it probably wasn't the Republican's best idea to nominate a man worth an estimated quarter billion dollars who made his fortune out of -- to use Mr. Romney's own words -- "harvest[ing]" companies for profit. The GOP had a small window of opportunity early on in the race to define Mr. Romney as an advocate for a new American dream and as a crusader for upward mobility and the middle class. Unfortunately, it would be Mitt Romney's own words that would slam that window shut.

The hundreds of millions spent by Karl Rove's American Crossroads and other third-party groups have done little to offset the candidate's self-inflicted wounds. From stating that "I'm not concerned about the very poor," to saying that his annual speaking fees of $370,000 are “not very much,” to casually offering a $10,000 bet during a primary debate, to writing off the 47% of Americans who voted for the president as welfare-dependent slackers who want the government to pay for everything, Mr. Romney has spent much of the last quarter on defense trying to rebut the notion that he has no idea what ordinary Americans are going through. It isn't working.

One recent Washington Post poll found that a stunning 57% of registered voters believe that Mr. Romney would do more to favor the wealthy, while 66% believe Mr. Obama does more to favor the middle class.

If the Obama campaign could have hand-selected their own Republican opponent, they could not have chosen a better adversary than Mitt Romney. Mr. Romney's weak candidacy coupled with Mr. Obama's precision messaging and massive turnout operation all but ensures that the president will earn a second term.


*Georgia Logothetis is Managing Director of the Hellenic American Leadership Council and Contributing Editor at DailyKos.com

©2012 NEOCORP MEDIA





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