Romney is just really, really bad at campaigning and not making himself look like an entitled jerk.
I mean, this campaign has been one blunder after another ever since last year. "Companies are people" "Ten thousand dollar bet", a refusal to put his tax return thing to bed IN THE PRIMARIES when most people aren't even paying attention, allowing it to be made a constant issue brought up again and again, his "foreign policy tour" blunders, his selection of a very divisive figure of Paul Ryan as his VP, whom he then forces to walk away from his policies and convictions to keep the ticket electable, his speech forgetting to acknowledge the servicemen in Afganistan, his decision to politicize the deaths of four Americans drawing ire and scorn from all sides of politics except the absolute far right fringe, and now apparently over an hours worth of footage of him crapping on half of the electorate to a bunch of rich people.
And then there's his incredible vagueness and lack of details on EVERY SINGLE ISSUE, even when pressed, his tendency to spread outright lies and falsehoods over and over again in a way I've never seen any other political campaign do so frequently, blatantly and poorly for that matter. Finally, there's the constant FLIP FLOPPING on every single issue, sometimes within days of each other!
Mitt Romney is simply a terrible politician and a terrible candidate, and it's laughable to even compare him to Kerry. Kerry had his own issues: bland, unexciting, flip flopped on the Iraqi war after it turned out unpopular, and he had no idea how to deal with the swift boating non sense. He was not very good at running for president. But he wasn't this bad, not NEARLY so. He didn't flip flop nearly as much (pretty much just on the Iraq War, perhaps a few other issues though I can't recall), and he had a core.
Mitt Romney is Michael Dukakis. Not only is the comparisan a tad more apt because he was a governor of Massachuessets, but because much like the 1988 election, this election isn't really much of a nail biter, because Dukakis just sucked at running for president. Like Romney, he was too fake looking, getting into a tank to make himself look like he'd have tough foreign policy. It will be nowhere close to the 1988 land slide, but Obama IS going to win, and he's going to win by at least a few points. John Kerry at least made the race really close, with George Bush taking the popular vote by less then a point. That's not going to happen here.
In the end, Romney's biggest problem is that he has no core. As a result, he has no convictions, no solid policies, nothing to market himself beyond "I have a history of turning companies around", something the Obama campaign has done a pretty solid job destroying with their attacks on Bain which, of course, caused Mitt Romney to begin to stop talking about his time at Bain. Much like how he won't talk about his time as governor as Massachusetts because it'll reveal how hypocritical his stance on Obamacare is (heck, he even said Romneycare should be a model for the nation!). This is also why he's going to lose in the debates, which REQUIRE him to take some sort of policy position, and where any lie he tells about Obama will be quickly refuted by Obama himself. This is what happens when you have no core and no vision, at least one that you're willing to talk about.
As a result, Mitt Romney has nothing going for him except incredibly high Obama dissastisfaction among his own base, which is pretty much his only hope to even make this a race anymore. Barring some economic disaster, absolutely nothing is going to change, and Romney is going to lose.
I voted for Kerry in the poll though. Probably should have selected "other".
badgenome said:
Those polls consistently oversample Democrats, though. But yeah, Romney does have loser written all over him. Then again, so does Obama at this point. Whoever wins, it really won't have been on his own merits but rather because of the electorate's distaste for his opponent. |
This is what people always do when their candidate is losing: blame the pollsters.
There is no oversampling going on towards the democrats in these polls. Polling these days is an incredibly exact science that relies heavily on past trends, and typically has a very solid track record. I encourage you to just follow www.fivethirtyeight.com. They are the best polling aggregate out there, and where dead on in both 2008 and 2010. They are going to be dead on in 2012 to.
The only poll that is "over sampling" anything is Rasmussen, which over samples Republicans. Their polling methedology expects republicans to turn out +3 over democrats or independents, which has not happened once in the modern history of polling. It is this polling methedology that lead them to somehow overestimate the historic gains in 2010 (!?), and it's causing them to overestimate the republican's chances this cycle too.
Fivethirtyeight is giving us the most accurate picture here, and things aren't looking pretty for Romney. They are only going to get worse.
