A lot of Dems are now out on the ledge after Monday's Pew Research poll numbers from Monday that showed Romney with a 4 point lead among likely voters. There have been some state polls in the last few days that also show Romney getting a bounce of varying degrees though Obama still leads in a CNN poll among likely Ohio voters by 4 points.
For more see Nate Silver
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/oct-9-romney-erases-obamas-convention-bounce-in-forecast/
There's been some mixed pictures as the tracking polls seem to suggest that the Romney bounce has dissipated. Gallup yesterday shows Obama up 49-46 among registered voters-it was 49-45 prior to the debate. On the other hand Romney right now has a 49-47 lead in Gallupsnewly featured likely voters. Still, Gallup also has show the President's approval rating surge over the last two days. He now has a 53% approval rating with only 42% disapproving-this was taken from October 6 to October 8.
So at least if most see the President as having bombed in the debate they don't show any signs of thinking less of him. Overall, this is a mixed picture. We'll have to see what happens the next few days. Of course, the Biden-Ryan debate may have some impact. Despite Romney's bounce he still only has a 30% chance of winning according the Five Thirty Eight Forecast.
Certainly this is not a time to panic-as if that ever helps. Some Dems certainly are, like Andrew Stewart:
"A handful of liberal pundits — amplifying the visceral reactions of the party’s liberal base to the debate and Obama’s subsequent dip in the polls — think the plane is plunging into a cliff. They have found their muse in Daily Beast columnist Andrew Sullivan, whom Obama reads regularly and was once invited to a White House state dinner.
“Did Obama just throw away the election?” Sullivan wrote in a widely read column posted Monday night, which drew 21,000 Facebook likes within a few hours.
"Sullivan, a political iconoclast who supports the president, became agitated after the release of a Pew poll Monday showing Romney vaulting 4 points ahead of Obama — a 12-point swing among likely voters since last month.
”[H]as that kind of swing ever happened this late in a campaign?” he asked, noting that Obama’s commanding lead among female voters had evaporated. “Has any candidate lost 18 points among women voters in one night ever? And we are told that when Obama left the stage that night, he was feeling good. That’s terrifying. On every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82226.html#ixzz28uYCrFcV
Wow! Take it easy Andrew! Yes there have been big swings late before. What about Kerry's big bounce from his debate in 2004? Bush had a 10 point lead prior to it and after they were tied. Sound familiar? Talk about bedwetting!
This is not to say that there's no source for concern. I can't imagine that unmarried women suddenly believe in Mitt Romney seeing as he has the same abysmal policies as before the debate as he has after. It's disheartening that Romney's dishonest strategy seems to pay such dividends at least in the short term. In the longer term I still think we'll be fine.
A lot of indicators point the the President winning-the rising S&P during this election, the fact that no incumbent President who wasn't primaried has lost since Herbert Hoover, the fact that the candidate leading after the convention usually wins. It's striking how similar this race has been to 2004. Like Kerry, Romney got no convention bounce but then had a very successful first debate that gave him a short term bounce.
Here's Greg Sargent in his aptly titled: "Chill, Obama Supporters, Chill."
"This race began as a toss up. It is now a toss up. Barring some unforeseen event, it will remain a toss up until the end. Which it was always going to be from the start."
"Politico has a big story this morning documenting the widespread alarm among Obama supporters about the dramatic tightening in the polls we’re seeing right now. Dem strategist Jim Jordan captures the prevailing sentiments well:
“That’s my party: Irrational overconfidence followed by irrational despair.”
"It’s true that Obama seemed to be widening his lead to a significant margin in the days leading up to the debate. But a lot of that may have reflected the bump Obama received from his convention. Yes, Obama’s debate performance was a disaster. But in many ways, the crucial element at the debate was not just Obama’s terrible showing; it was Mitt Romney’s excellent one. After months of operating from a failed theory of the race — which led him to make the race only about Obama — Romney made a strong affirmative case for himself and his policies. It was full of distortions and evasions about the true nature of his actual agenda, but it was unquestionably a politcally effective presentation of the case for his candidacy, rather than simply an indictment of the Obama presidency."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line
I think for me, that's the part that gets me so much-that Romney's debate performance was so effective as it was so full of distortions and evasions about the true nature of his actual agenda.
If you want to know my concern, it's this. Can the President do better? I think he can. He has won his share of political debates before. Surely this won't be hard. Romney gave us so many missed opportunities to call him out in that debate that I feel that any Democrat in the country-let alone the Democrats we saw at the convention: Clinton, John Kerry, Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Ted Strickland...
Surely the President can too? That's my one worry. Is it possible that the knock on his debating prowess is true? Or that he's done to many interviews on the lines of "I just flirted with Potus?" (Not that I begrudge him that interview. And that young lady gets to brag for a long time). I don't believe it but you know how these nagging little worries are. It's not rocket science. He needs to simply defend his economic record-the 7.8% unemployment rate gives it a new oomph though it was not hard to make prior to that either.
We've seen 150,000 jobs created for the last 12 months; 4.5 million private sector jobs since the stimulus kicked in February 2010. This is more than enough to make up for population growth. True we want more but had Paul Ryan and his Republican friends in the House passed the President's jobs bill we would have gotten this more.
The President has a defensible record. Can he defend it effectively? If yes this whole debate furor will be put to bed. At the minimum he should be able to smile winningly-as he's done so many times before.
Then: he goes after Romney's lies from the first debate while ready to defend any new Romney's obfuscations. Romney's strategy, we have to hope, has now become clear the Obama team.
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