Romney’s Playing Field Narrows

By artappraiser on Sun, 09/09/2012 - 6:46pm |

By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, September 7, 2012

[....] Romney is targeting eight states: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and New Hampshire. No Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. This is surely not because Romney is husbanding scarce cash [....]

The reason this looks worrisome for Romney is that he’s pursuing an electoral-college strategy that requires him nearly to run the table of competitive states. The states where Romney is not competing (and which aren’t obviously Republican, either) add up to 247 electoral votes. The eight states where Romney is competing add up to a neat 100 electoral votes, of which Romney needs 79 and Obama just 23. If you play with the electoral possibilities, you can see that this would mean Obama could win with Florida alone or Ohio plus a small state or Virginia plus a couple small states, and so on.

Unless I’m missing something badly here, Romney needs either a significant national shift his way — possibly from the debates or some other news event — or else to hope that his advertising advantage is potent enough to move the dial in almost every swing state in which he’s competing [....]

URL:

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09/romneys-playing-field-narrows.html

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Mitt's pollster taunts that "my grass roots & GOTV is better than yours":

Newhouse adds that the most recent CNN/ORC polling shows that 62 per cent of Republicans are "extremely' or "very" excited about the election while only 56 per cent of Democrats feel that way.

He also said that the Romney campaign's grass-roots effort—with more than 20 million voters contacted by volunteers so far—will be another important factor leading to a Romney victory.

by artappraiser on Mon, 09/10/2012 - 1:47pm

Karl Rove has basically been talking similar: many of the extra voters that came out to help you win last time are not going to come out this time and we can get enough of the really disaffected ones to win:

http://www.rove.com/articles/414

P.S. He makes it sound like Paul Ryan's job is to be hipster-attractive to millenials; good luck on that, hah. (Though I do think that many of them might find attacks on Social Security and Medicare seductive.)

by artappraiser on Mon, 09/10/2012 - 5:47pm

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