Irrational Republican Exuberance?

     Finally some in the media seem to get it! This whole idea that wining one debate means election is just bizarre:

     "News orgs have been too credulous in reporting on Mitt Romney’s supposedly continuing “surge.” The Romney campaign has carefully orchestrated the appearance of “momentum,” and even though tracking polls suggest the race has stabilized, the “momentum” storyline persists.
But little by little, a new storyline is taking hold: Whatever is happening on the national level, the fact remains that Romney faces a more daunting climb in the electoral math than Obama does — meaning the President is currently leading."

      "Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan analyst who helps shape conventional Beltway wisdom, pointed out yesterday that the math is harder for Romney. And today, Mike Allen’s Playbook led with the same idea:

As an antidote to the (perhaps) irrational Republican exuberance that seems to have seized D.C., we pause for the following public-service announcement. To be President, you have to win states, not debates.And Mitt Romney has a problem. Despite a great debate and what The Wall Street Journal’s Neil King Jr. on Sunday called a polling “surge,” Romney has not put away a single one of the must-have states.President Obama remains the favorite because he only needs to win a couple of the toss-ups. Mitt needs to win most of them.A cold shower for the GOP: Most polling shows Romney trailing in Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Iowa — by MORE than Obama trails in North Carolina....

Barack Obama had the math. And math, not momentum, gets you the big house, the bulletproof car, the cool plane.

     "To make this as clear as possible, I am not predicting an Obama victory, and have not done so in the past. This race is a dead heat, and I’ve said for a long time now that Romney can still win, even back when Obama held a comfortable lead."

    "That said, the polling averages tell a very clear story right now: Obama is slightly ahead in the electoral college. All of the four major national averages — Real Clear Politics, Pollster.com, TPM, and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight — show Obama with small leads in Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Iowa (which is tighter). That would put Obama well past 270. He has more room for error right now than Romney does."

       http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line

       Just win a single debate and you win the election is the Romney narrative. Indeed, there is this peddled idea that the likely outcome will be either an Obama squeaker or Romney near landslide. As this point about the states makes, this is quite unrealistic. In fact the opposite is true. Romney has to win enough swing states, whereas the President needs only a few.

       This is all right out of the Karl Rove playbook. While the Romney post-Denver momentum has been over for 11 days, the thinking is that you can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy by oft repeating it, assuming the media aids and abets you-many have done.

      Still as a general proposition of both politics and life: perception is not at least by itself, reality.

       "The case that Romney is on track to victory rests heavily on the argument that he retains momentum and that undecided voters are breaking his way. It’s unclear what the evidence is for this — if anything, the race in those states has now become remarkably stable, despite that earlier tightening — but let’s accept it for the sake of argument. Even if Romney does retain some momentum, my metric for judging the race remains simple: That momentum will only become genuinely significant if Romney starts showing a tie or leads in the consensus of the polling averages of the key states where Obama now leads."

      "I would also add one thing to what Allen said above about North Carolina: Virginia also bears watching. The polling averages show a tighter race in Virginia than in Ohio. Yet there’s virtually no discussion of the fact that Romney has not taken Virginia off the board. Why?"

        "Yes, Florida is a state where Romney clearly does have momentum. But as Scott Conroy notes, even Romney’s supporters say Romney still has to fight to win it. And this:

Florida is a must-win state for him. If he were to fall short, he would have to sweep the remaining eight battlegrounds in order to win the presidency -- a scenario that not even his rosiest spinmeister would deem credible. For Obama, on the other hand, Florida is a prime opportunity to seal the deal rather than a necessity for political survival.