Looking Toward November

In an article published on October 11, 2010, Time Magazine was surprisingly tough on Obama.

They wrote, "Barack Obama is being politically crushed in a vise. From above, by elite opinion about his competence. From below, by mass anger and anxiety over unemployment.

And it is too late for him to do anything about this predicament until after November’s elections." We all know how that worked out for him.

Time went on to say, "With the exception of core Obama Administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters. This view is held by Fox News pundits, executives and anchors at the major old-media outlets, reporters who cover the White House, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and governors, many Democrat business people and lawyers who raised big money for Obama in 2008, and even some members of the Administration just beyond the inner circle."

It represented a grim assessment and his prospects haven’t gotten any better in the last twenty months. In fact, it may not be too farfetched to describe Obama’s remaining base as being made up of just three kinds of people: a) blacks, who will vote for him because of his skin color, b) those who are too dumb to know any better, and b) those who are so rich as to be completely out of touch with reality. Everyone else has pretty much concluded that he is in way over his head and is so hidebound by socialist ideology that he’ll never do what needs to be done.

His recent war against the Catholic Church is evidence of his political ineptitude. Just as he has done with so many other groups, Obama has not only given Catholics no reason to vote for him, but plenty of motivation NOT to vote for him or anyone who supports him. In the 2008 election, Roman Catholics voted for Obama by a margin of 54-46%. It was a principal underlying reason why he was elected. However, there is little chance that Catholics will be lining up to support him this year. A recent Pew poll shows that, prior to his war against religious freedom, he was leading by 9 points among Catholics. Today, that lead is gone and he trails by 5 points. Pick any state with a large Catholic population and put it in the Romney column.

But his loss of support among Jewish voters, a normally reliable Democratic constituency, is just as dramatic. According to a poll conducted by Siena College, his support among Jewish New Yorkers has fallen from 62% support, 32% oppose, a 32% margin during the month of May, to a current level of 51% support, 43% oppose, a margin of only 8%. If that trend continues, New York’s 31 electoral votes could easily end up in the Romney column.

Overall, daily tracking polls indicate that Obama and Romney are running roughly neck and neck and that, if the election were held tomorrow, the election could go either way by a margin of one or two percentage points. Of course, there are two very important factors not considered in arriving at that assessment. It ignores the fact that: a) Respondents are known to lie to poll-takers, afraid that they may appear to be racists if they express their true feelings about Obama, and 2) History tells us that whatever percentage of respondents fall into the "undecided" category almost always end up voting for the challenger.

In other words, if polls show Obama leading Romney by 46% to 45%, we can be almost certain that at least 5% of those who express support for Obama are lying about it. A truer picture would have Romney leading by 4 points, 45-41%. And since history shows that essentially all of the undecided vote will go to the non-incumbent, the actual outcome of the election… if it were held tomorrow… would be in the neighborhood of 59% to 41%, Romney defeating Obama.

There is evidence that Obama’s predicament is so dire that he and his handlers are bound to be losing a lot of sleep over it. For example, in the May 8 West Virginia primary, Obama received 59% of the vote while an inmate in a federal penitentiary in Beaumont, Texas, Keith Judd, received 41%. Two weeks later, on May 22, Obama was embarrassed once again when more than 40% of Democratic primary voters in Arkansas and Kentucky voted against him. In fact, Obama failed to win a majority in over half of Kentucky’s 120 counties.

Obama apologists will undoubtedly claim that these were mere anomalies, unique to just a few states. But that’s not true. On May 22, 2012, the Washington Post reported that a review of the 16 states in which voters have been given an alternative to Obama in a Democratic primary… whether an actual candidate, an "uncommitted" option, or a write-in… Obama has averaged 84.6% of the vote. While in the five states where there was an actual named opponent, Obama’s share of the vote averaged only 72.7%. These results are from a study of only Democratic primary voters.

The Post reported that, "In a wholly non-competitive Democratic primary in New Hampshire in January, a smattering of candidates took 18% of the Democratic primary vote, including 10% who chose to write in a candidate rather than vote for Obama." Similarly, in North Carolina, a state Obama is counting on to help him win reelection, more than 20% of Democratic primary voters chose the "uncommitted" option over Obama.

In other states, between 11% and 14% of Democrats in Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Rhode Island and Tennessee registered no candidate preference rather than vote for Obama. And in Missouri, 12% voted for other candidates or "uncommitted." In the Oklahoma Democratic primary on March 6, Obama collected 57 percent of the statewide vote, but failed to win a majority in 15 of the state’s 77 counties. Four minor candidates combined to take 43 percent of the statewide Democratic vote.

Looking ahead to November, it might be helpful to establish the Obama and Romney baselines to help us predict the final outcome. The Obama-Biden baseline (electoral votes in parentheses) might appear as follows: California (55), Connecticut (7), District of Columbia (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (21), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (12), New York (31), Oregon (7), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), and Washington (11), for a total of 168 electoral votes.

The Romney baseline is estimated as follows: Alabama (9), Alaska (3), Arizona (10), Arkansas (6), Georgia (15), Idaho (4), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (9), Mississippi (6), Missouri (11), Montana (3), Nebraska (5), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Carolina (8), South Dakota (3), Tennessee (11), Texas (34), Utah (5), West Virginia (5), and Wyoming (3), for a total of 174 electoral votes.

Of the remaining states, all of which are up for grabs, and all of which went for Obama in 2008, the states of Colorado (9), Florida (27), Indiana (11), Iowa (7), Maine (4), Nevada (5), New Hampshire (4), New Mexico (5), North Carolina (15), Ohio (20), and Virginia (13), with a total of 120 electoral votes, are likely to go for Romney. If so, and if Obama-Biden are able to hold onto Delaware (3), Michigan (17), Minnesota (10), New Jersey (15), Pennsylvania (21), and Wisconsin (10), Romney would win a total of 294 electoral votes to 244 for Obama-Biden.

However, if Romney is able to carry the states of Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, all of which is within the realm of possibility, he will hand Obama what he so richly deserves: a defeat of landslide proportions, 367 to 171. Either way, the Romney victory count in the Electoral College should be somewhere between 294 and 367 votes, while the most Obama can hope to win will be 244.

Nevertheless, when it becomes clear on the evening of November 6 that Mitt Romney has won at least 33 states with 294 electoral votes, and that Republicans have won majorities in both houses of Congress, the country will undergo an almost instantaneous transformation. Businesses, large and small, looking forward to a future of economic certainty, will begin to announce hiring and expansion plans and people and corporations with offshore capital reserves will make plans to repatriate those funds. The country will begin to heal.

A June 7 Wall Street Journal op-ed column, titled What’s Changed After Wisconsin, declared, "There is, now, a house-of-cards feel about this administration… It became apparent some weeks ago when the president talked on the stump… about an essay by a fellow who said spending growth (during the Obama era) is actually lower than that of previous presidents.

"This was startling to a lot of people who looked into it and found the man had left out most spending from 2009, the first year of Mr. Obama’s presidency. People sneered: The president was deliberately using a misleading argument to paint a false picture! But… why would he go out there waving an article that could immediately be debunked? Maybe because he thought it was true?" The Journal concluded that it is even more alarming to discover that "he knows so little about the effects of his own economic program that he thinks he really is a low spender?"
As Abraham Lincoln once said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." Clearly, Obama actually believes he has the charm and the intellect to fool all of the people all of the time, but with each passing day more and more people conclude that he is nothing more than an empty suit armed with a speechwriter and a teleprompter.