Josh Marshall, last night, took note of Mitt Romney's obituary.
Earlier this evening I noted this eye-popping graphic which shows that Mitt Romney's net favorability rating has plummeted to -24%. I don't think many political observers would disagree that someone that far under water public opinion-wise is just not going to be elected president. That's not going to happen. ...TPM
This is where Romney must think, Marshall writes, about unwinding the damage. He can do it, up to a point. Maybe Super Tuesday?
But fundamentally Mitt Romney’s reputation has taken a terrible beating across the spectrum, especially with independent and loosely affiliated voters. (He’s actually hitting almost Gingrich levels of unpopularity. He’s at -24 and Newt’s at -36.9.)
So when does he start to repair the damage? Ideally, right now. But that’s the problem. Not only is the race not sewn up; the stitches seem to get looser by the day. ...TPM
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Romney vs. Obama? And with Obama's positive ratings still down there?
Not so much.
Showing steady improvement since early December, Mr. Obama’s approval rating has reached the 50 percent mark in The Times/CBS News poll — an important baseline in presidential politics and his highest approval rating since May 2010 (excepting the brief bump he received after Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011).
For the first time since the election season began in earnest in the late summer, as many Democratic voters as Republicans said they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting in the 2012 presidential election. That would appear to wipe out the “enthusiasm gap” that promised to help Republicans greatly next fall. ...NYT
The Times report is interesting in view of what has come to be known as the Republican enthusiasm gap, a pretty wide gap between the Republican enthusiasm of previous election years. Many have been genuinely surprised at the low turnout in the primaries, in state after state.
Nothing is for sure, as the Times points out. "Grim" news still comes out of Europe; the economy, globally, is still uncertain at best.
As for Obama vs. Romney? The Times/CBS poll bears out what Josh Marshall points to as Romney's suicidal dive in his primary races.
... The poll showed that even Mr. Romney would lose to Mr. Obama by six percentage points among all registered voters if the election were held today. The past couple of months appear to have greatly harmed Mr. Romney’s standing with independent voters, who favored him over Mr. Obama in January by 46 percent to 39 percent but now favor Mr. Obama over Mr. Romney by 49 percent to 38 percent. ...NYT
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InTrade shows Romney's drop in the polls -- as Republican nominee -- from the mid-90's to 74%, with Obama's rise as election winner to a hair off 60%.
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The Washington Post's commentator, Harold Meyerson, looks at the Romney problem and finds that, to a great extent, it's the Republican problem.
... The kind of divisions that have characterized Democratic presidential primaries since the 1984 contest between Walter Mondale and Gary Hart have now popped up in GOP primaries as well: This year, Republicans are dividing along lines of class.
According to data compiled by the Wall Street Journal, in all the states that have voted thus far, Mitt Romney has won 46 percent of the counties with incomes higher than the statewide median, and just 15 percent of those with incomes beneath the statewide median. Rick Santorum, by contrast, has won 39 percent of the counties with higher income, and 46 percent of those with lower income. ...WaPo
The "classism" problem was a Democratic party problem for years -- decades. Now it belongs to the Republicans, by their own choice and with considerable help from Karl Rove whose data-digging gave George W. Bush his close wins, if real wins they were.
These numbers — a product of the kind of residential-sorting-by-class that Charles Murray documents in his new book, “Coming Apart” — reinforce exit polling that shows Romney’s strongest supporters come from households making more than $100,000 a year. Indeed, the higher up the income scale, the higher the level of Romney support.
These numbers look familiar to anyone who has tracked Democratic presidential primary voting for the past three decades. Beginning with the Hart-Mondale donnybrook, Democratic voters have often clustered by class. ...WaPo
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No wonder Republicans don't want to talk about "classism." It's classism that's destroying them from within. Here's how the class basis for winning elections was constructed, described by Peter Wallsten.
... They learned a lot of lessons from watching Democrats over the years, including in 2000 where Democrats did a remarkable job of getting voters to the polls. But what the Republicans and what the Bush-Rove-Mehlman machine realized after 2000 was that Republicans needed to do a better job. So they went back and studied what happened in the battleground states around the country, and they started looking at ways to harness new technology to really surpass the Democrats, which is what they have done. A big part of our book is looking at what has become knownas "the voter vault" -- a massive database of not only voter names, party registration, and where they stand on key issues, but massive amounts of marketing data that have helped the Republicans find new voters. Previously unaffiliated voters and voters who have traditionally voted Democratic.
What they've done is they've amassed, over the past 6 years, marketing data from retailers, from automotive dealerships. They know what kind of car you drive. They might know what kind of toothpaste you purchase. They know what your favorite alcoholic beverage is. They've managed to come up with a system in which they use all of this marketing data to decide if somebody is more likely to be a conservative-minded person. Maybe they've voted Democratic in the past. But perhaps they would be open to very targetted appeals. Perhaps they're into fitness and they go to a certain gym.. It's a way to reach voters. One woman that Tom found in Ohio, suburban Ohio... She's an African-American woman who had voted Democratic for many, many years. She was identified by the Republican Party because she lived in a golfing community, she sent her children to a private school, and they realized there were certain issues that Republicans could bring to her. So she lives in suburban Ohio and she actually voted for Kerry in 2004. But she was besieged with appeals from the Republican Party and now tells us that she's open to voting Republican in the future. In long-term vision, that's a victory. ... Prairie Weather, July, 2006
