90 Days Until the Election—and Obama Has the Advantage
Barack Obama has the advantage with 90 days to go until November 6, and the Romney campaign mostly has itself to blame. Four years after Obama’s decisive victory in 2008, a poor economy, dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, and mediocre approval ratings have conspired to endanger the president’s reelection chances. But a close race, which is what the polls show, is not the same as a dead heat. Romney is an imperfect candidate who has been poorly served by a strategy that has failed to contest Obama’s predictable attacks, leaving him poorly positioned heading into the conventions.
Over the last four years, Obama’s coalition suffered deep enough losses to give his challenger a legitimate path to victory. But those losses were narrow and concentrated among white voters without a college degree, as Obama retains near-2008 levels of support among minorities and college-educated whites. As a wealthy former CEO of a private equity firm with an awkward cadence who could never call himself a great politican, Romney has never naturally appealed to white working class voters, and, as a result, Romney’s ability to capitalize on Obama’s biggest weakness requires him to overcome his own.
With three months to go, these weaknesses are as pronounced as ever. The Obama campaign adopted a strategy to remedy their weakness among white working class voters by defining Romney as an out-of-touch, outsourcing plutocrat willing to close factories, fire workers, and avoid taxes to advance his self-interest. If the Romney campaign possessed effective tools to blunt Obama’s offensive, they weren’t properly employed. Instead, the Romney campaign inexplicably focused on attacking a well-defined incumbent president, while permitting Obama and his allies to broadcast unflattering and uncontested tales about an undefined challenger.
