Presidential election minus two months

With the Democratic convention under way, and two months minus one day to go until the big day, matters American are looming sufficiently large that I’m starting up a dedicated thread to accommodate them. At this stage of the race, all indications are that Barack Obama has a clear but not insurmountable lead. Premier US psephoblogger Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight calculates a 74.8% chance of an Obama victory, which has widened over the past week owing to a sub-par convention bounce for Mitt Romney (Clint Eastwood, we salute you). With 270 Electoral College votes required for victory, averaged poll results give Obama leads of over 5% in states accounting for 221 votes, and Romney leads accounting for 182. Piggies in the middle:

EC VOTES OBAMA ROMNEY
New Hampshire 4 49.1 44.7
Nevada 6 48.7 45.0
Wisconsin 10 48.7 45.4
Michigan 16 47.4 44.6
Virginia 13 47.4 44.8
Ohio 18 46.7 44.4
Iowa 6 46.2 44.6
Colorado 9 46.9 45.6
South Carolina 9 43.2 43.4
Florida 29 46.6 46.9
North Carolina 15 45.4 46.8

It should be noted that these figures capture Romney in his convention bounce, and conventional wisdom (no pun intended) tells us they should now be set to bounce the other way.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

178 comments on “Presidential election minus two months”

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  1. 97

    There are 2 reasons to have the executive chosen by an elected body rather than direct.

    The first is to have a body that scrutinises and can remove, at any point and for any reason, the executive so they are kept on their toes. The where it exists, is entirely conclusive and should happen. However this is not the case with the electoral college as it votes only once and does not even meet all together in one place.

    The second argument is that the will of the majority should be divided up so that some people have greater electoral sway than others. This is an undemocratic argument.

    The Maine-Nebraska method opens the presidency up to being decided by gerrymanderers. Allocating any significant number of electoral college members to the popular vote winner drastically reduces the likelihood that there would be a different outcome to the popular vote and thus renders the choosing of members of the electoral college any other way, practically useless as that is the point of not having a direct election.

  4. Re Obama’s pre-poll anxiety re a Gulf War
    New and startling claims
    _______________________
    Prof Gary Leaup.a US expert on the Gulf…says that Obama’s fear of an Israeli air-strike on Iran has led him to make it clear to the Iranians in background talks that such an attack will not have the endorsement of the US…and Iran should not attack US bases or ships in the Gulf is such an attack occurs

    That makes it clear that Netanyahu is alone and must bear any consequences in re an attack.. quite ..alone
    Leupp says nothing like this has hapopened befree and have left the Israeli leadership aghast and stunned
    They must hope for his defeat all the more

    see Counterpunch article below

    http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/05/us-and-israeli-tensions-over-iran-strike-bared/

  5. Tom, the problem is the United States is a federal republic and many Americans would feel a direct election is just NYC’s and LA’s to decide (true or not, that’s how it is perceived) a slate of popular vote electors need not be big, just big enough to decide a close election. It would add legitimacy.

    As for gerrymandering, that is an issue that needs to be fixed. However, it’s pretty much a case of accepting it if you dismiss the potential of a system because of it.

  7. [ David Plouffe told me on @GMA to not expect a big post-convention bounce for Obama.]

    Sounds like expectations management to me. Nonetheless, I would presume there’s a relationship between the size of the first convention bounce and the size of the second. The support a candidate amasses after a convention is, by definition, soft. So Romney’s apparent convention flop doesn’t leave a big harvest of low-hanging fruit awaiting to be gathered by Obama.

  10. William

    I think Nate Silver’s blog, although excellent to read, has a democratic lean in analysis of the electoral odds. I have been reading it for the past 12 months. There is a lively debate in the comments on his own blog. I understand Intrade which is a book being run on the election (where punters can buy in or sell into the market) has the odds at 58/42. With the poll lead to Obama at around 1 to 2 points before both conventions, I think that is more realistic. It seems Romney has gotten a lift, substantially so, from his choice of VP, more than his convention. I also doubt the democrats will get much out pf their convention since Obama is not a nominee who needs introduction to the people, he is the sitting president and therefore a known quantity.

  11. Fox News managed to spend about half its convention discussion time yesterday on the omission of God and Jerusalem from the party platform. Good distraction for them. When they did talk about Clinton’s speech it was no more than lukewarm praise, sometimes qualified. Huge contrast from last week.

  15. @ABCNews24: From 11:30am EST #ABCNews24 will bring you live coverage of the #DNC2012 including addresses from @JoeBiden and US President @BarackObama

  16. “@JezFernandezABC: Barack Obama’s speech to the Dems National Convention expected at 1230 AEST. We’ll have it live on @ABCNews24”

  18. How good is Bill Clinton as a speaker? This good!

    [What Bill Clinton Wrote vs. What Bill Clinton Said
    We decided to compare the two versions to see how one of the great speechmakers of his era goes about his business.]

    h­ttp://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/09/what-bill-clinton-said-vs-what-he-wrote/56562/

  23. The rationale for the Electoral College was initially: a view of the impracticality of voters widely scattered across 13 colonies participating in a direct presidential election; the difficulty entailed in a Presidential candidate campaigning or even making himself known across all the colonies; and a view that many ordinary voters were not qualified to make the choice, but that it would be better if voters chose wise men (but not wise women back then) to make the choice for them. None of these rationales now apply and the last is anti-democratic. The electoral college has all the disadvantages of single member electorates, as the 2000 result clearly shows. The state-based ‘winner take all’ amplifies this. In addition, the weighting in favour of smaller states discriminates against more urbanised areas and these days is a built-in bias to the Republicans. Further, there are few restrictions on manipulating electoral boundaries by State legislatures. Gerrymandering and malapportionment are widespread, so determining electoral votes at the Congressional District level would not help. In my view, the Electoral College system is a severe deficiency in the US Presidential electoral system. Direct election would ensure that the vote of a rural Idahoan is equal to that of a Manhatanite. A further change I’d recommend to the USA: you’ve already adopted one Australian innovation – the ballot box. I’d recommend another one – preferential voting.

  24. Agreed Steve777. My American brother-in-law resides in NYC. He’s a hard core Republican who wonders if it’s worth voting because NY is a heavily Democratic state, and we all know Obama will win it. A Democrat in Texas would face the same predicament; Romney will win it, so why bother voting?

    If the Electoral College was abolished and replaced with a popular vote, presidential candidates might actually campaign in the big ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states instead of spending most of their time (and money) in a handful of swing states.

    Nowhere in the US is gerrymandering more egregious than in Texas. Some of the districts are extremely oddly shaped, courtesy of a GOP-dominated state legislature that seeks to herd Democratic areas into as few districts as possible. A few districts do take the word “gerrymander” back to its roots: they look a bit like salamanders.

  25. 124

    Direct election, or at least the National popular Vote Interstate Compact version of it, would increase the voter turnout in safe states, particularly is safe seats. This is another reason for it.

  26. TTFAB

    [The first is to have a body that scrutinises and can remove, at any point and for any reason, the executive so they are kept on their toes. The where it exists, is entirely conclusive and should happen. However this is not the case with the electoral college as it votes only once and does not even meet all together in one place.]

    You could have a recall provision, similar to that tried most recently against Governor Walker in Wisconsin and Grey Davis in California. The former failed and the latter passed.

    For mine, unless the office is purely ceremonial (in which case why have it?) then one vote one value needs to apply. I agree though that a preferential voting system might restrain the influence of spoiler candidates.

    That all said, I’m not sure there is a need for a President in the sense that the US has them. As with Australia, I think the whole way governance is resolved needs an overhaul from the base up.

  27. If only the Democratic party had someone as good as Bill Clinton able to run for office at the moment.

    It will be scary to see what might happen when the Tea Party gets its hands on the White House and the House of Reps (less so the Senate) for a couple of years.

    Obama has been a failure, fingers crossed he scrapes through for the sake of the progressive side of politics. But I think his goose is cooked on the economy alone. It is all the right have to concentrate on this election, plus they have the money this time.

    You only had to look at the conventions to see which side has the most money this time around.

    Money matters in American politics.

  28. Deflationite – money matters very much in our politics too, as the well-funded disinformation campaigns against the Mineral Resource Rent Tax and Poker Machine reform amply attest.

  30. Eva Longoria gave a pretty good speech too (about 5 mins). She had a great line about how Eva Longoria who flipped burgers at Wendy’s needed a tax cut more than the Eva Longoria who works on movie sets.

  31. Deflationite – in my own opinion, Obama has only been a failure to the extent that he did not live up to the impossible promise of 2008. I think that he’s done as well as could be reasonably expected, given the constraints of the post GFC economy, the USA’s dreadful financial position (which a hostile Congress won’t let him address) and the mess he inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I agree with you that the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. The crazy Republicans need at least four more years out of power to sort themselves out.

  32. This thread is a wonderful expression of the wrong priorities of the Australian “intelligentsia”.

    The obsession with the minutiae of US “conventions” which are just an USA civic ritual with more predictability than the politburo ‘elections’ in Beijing, is a sad indictment of the lack of objectivity about Australia’s position in the world and its real interests.

    I know the ALP, LNP, Murdoch press and commercial TV are united in this distorted and unsophisticated view of Australia’s future and it is impossible to challenge it given the decades of endless US cultural bombardment. (Totally support by Howard, Gillard, Conroy et al)

    To me, the US elections are boring and as enthralling as “Big Brother” which I assume is based on the same corporate media concept.

    Surely to Australia it matters not one iota whether Obama or Romney is elected.

  33. [Steve777
    Posted Friday, September 7, 2012 at 5:35 pm | Permalink
    Deflationite – in my own opinion, Obama has only been a failure to the extent that he did not live up to the impossible promise of 2008. I think that he’s done as well as could be reasonably expected, given the constraints of the post GFC economy, the USA’s dreadful financial position (which a hostile Congress won’t let him address) and the mess he inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I agree with you that the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. The crazy Republicans need at least four more years out of power to sort themselves out.
    ]

    The biggest mistake Obama made was not making an example of Wall Street.

    He should have let at least one ‘too big to fail’, fail.

    At least one. Companies that get themselves in trouble should be allowed to fail no matter how big.

    When they fail, the vacuum will be filled by others.

    When they are bailed out the debt gets taken up by the government and the people end up being those who have to pay for the failures of Wall Street.

    Obama was completely gutless when some real leadership was needed. To me that is a complete failure.

    He could have easily argued that the market needs to take care of market failures and that he did not want to burden main street with the debt of wall street.

    Instead he let wall street pass all their irresponsibility to main street with next to no consequence.

    We are left with a US zombie economy which will be much the same as Japan. Do nothing for decades.

    The decision which were made in the first year of the Obama presidency were crucial. Maybe unfair on a rookie, but on the key decision he acted exactly as a republican would have in the same situation. Bail out Wall Street.

  34. 126

    That involves more election campaigns and, particularly in the USA, that means a greater need for donations. It also sets out a bar, for removing executive officers, that is too high.

    Australia has a, generally, far better system than the USA. The main improvement I would make to the Australian system would be to give the powers of the Governor-General to the HoR and Senate. Appointment of ministers would be by the HoR (like in the ACT) and each house would control its own prorogation. I would also introduce Hare-Clark to the HoR and Senate.

  36. Review of Gallup three-day rolling average, covering Tuesday to Thursday:

    [President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party look as if they are getting at least a preliminary bounce from their convention. Today’s (Friday, Sept. 7) Gallup Daily tracking update puts Obama’s job approval rating at 52%, the highest it has been since May 2011, after the killing of Osama bin Laden. Obama has also moved to a 48% to 45% lead over Mitt Romney among registered voters in the election tracking, up from Obama’s 47% to 46% margin over the last nine days.]

  37. [Gallup Daily tracking update puts Obama’s job approval rating at 52%]

    …which is criticial info because I remember there being a significant increase in the chance of a president being elected if their Gallup approval is >50% and Obama’s hasn’t been at all for any sustained period since Feb 2010.

  38. I see fivethirtyeight now has Obama at 77% chance of winning which is amazing given the state of the economy over there. Probably more a reflection of the alternative than the incumbent….Obama having been able to frame the election as a “choice” rather than as a “referendum” as per 538 analysis.

    http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com

  39. I am starting to suspect this is gonna be a similar event to 2004, with a President who is certainly vulnerable, a polarised country and a challenger who just doesn’t capture the hearts and minds of the voters (helped by the incumbent party demonising him and using his gaffes against him).

  40. [To me, the US elections are boring and as enthralling as “Big Brother” which I assume is based on the same corporate media concept.]

    Then what you do is close this thread and shut up about it. Nobody cares about your anti-American bigotry, swamprat. Stop prattling on about it. This is a site about elections. Yes, Australian elections but also international elections – this includes American elections. If you don’t like it, leave.

  41. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kleinbard-tax-cheats-20120907,0,6526020.story

    [Op-Ed
    Tax planning? Or tax cheating?
    Laws that encourage corporate tax havens are bad for America.

    By Edward D. Kleinbard

    September 7, 2012

    For citizens hoping for serious tax policy and budget debates, this has been a dispiriting election cycle. One party urges tax rates too low to support any plausible platform from which government can deliver the services we all expect.

    Those are the Democrats.

    The other party inhabits a realm of fantasy akin to Erewhon, the fictional land created by the 19th century satirist Samuel Butler. In Erewhon, Butler wrote, “If a man has made a fortune … they exempt him from all taxation, considering him as a work of art, and too precious to be meddled with; they say, ‘How very much he must have done for society before society could have been prevailed upon to give him so much money.'”

    It is a pity that Republicans do not appreciate that Butler was writing ironically.

    And now, compounding the race to the bottom, Mitt Romney has stepped forward to congratulate corporate tax cheats. Romney recently announced at a fundraising event that big businesses “know how to find ways to get through the tax code, save money by putting various things in the places where there are low-tax havens around the world for their businesses.”]
    worth reading

  42. Bill Clinton made the case much more effectively than Obi himself… everyone has hit the negative point in terms of the integrity and impact of Repub policies, and that hopefully will register with middle class voters… but would doubt very much if anyone is inspired by any forward agenda beyond “we’ll keep doing what we have been doing and it will come right” – which is about as specific as the Dems can seem to get right now.

    Therefore the analogy with 2004 seems just about right to me. But doesnt look as close 2 months out – yet.

    Big focus on locking down Ohio, which makes sense. Cant see Romney losing there yet picking up Wisconsin, Iowa or New Hampshire.

    Big focus on dragging out the 2008 support base – this is the more critical question in terms of assistance with those senate and house races that determine the legislative BoP… Senate looks iffy to me (net +4 for Repubs definitely within grasp, think Warren has to beat Brown in Massachusets – she came across as a total class warrior in her speech), and I havent seen anything that suggests that the Dems could win back 25 house seats…

    At a broader level, if Repubs control both houses then am not sure what Obi can actually accomplish in his second term except to stymie their agenda – which is sufficient raison d’etre right there i suppose.

    The other really interesting thing is that not a soul mentioned the sequester coming up at the end of the year. Tax hikes and spending cuts across the board without a deal, which can only be made in the lame duck after Nov 6… the election might have some relevance in terms of who has the moral superiority going into such negotiations. Now THAT is the interesting inside baseball game to watch!

  44. Looks like a 5-6% bounce to Obama and the Democrats out of the convention, according to latest polls.

    Rumours that new polls in battleground states to be released by PPP in the next day or two are good for Obama.

  46. Carey Moore the III

    [Then what you do is close this thread and shut up about it. Nobody cares about your anti-American bigotry, swamprat. Stop prattling on about it.]

    I have closed this thread apart from this one-off curious interest to see what response I had. 🙂

    It is not so much my “anti-Americanism” as my anti Australians who see the sunshine shines out of the endless militaristic American arse (or should i say “ass’?).

    My complaint is against Australians who disregard our Asian location and challenge and want us welded to the USA.

    The USA is NOT a western Pacific power except through proxies like Australia (Darwin??).

    We have to grow up and be an independent, western Pacific / Asian country. Not a nation of unthinking snivelling idiots quite happy to sacrificing people in order to obey every political adventure the US decides.

  47. [ I am starting to suspect this is gonna be a similar event to 2004, with a President who is certainly vulnerable, a polarised country and a challenger who just doesn’t capture the hearts and minds of the voters (helped by the incumbent party demonising him and using his gaffes against him).]

    I agree. The Dems are using tactics from the GOP playbook to demonise Romney, and so far it’s working.

    The irony is, by GOP standards, Romney isn’t that bad. His 4 years as Governor of Massachusetts shows how moderate he can be. But he’s been forced to sell his soul to the Tea Party in order to get the nomination in the first place.

  49. [The irony is, by GOP standards, Romney isn’t that bad. His 4 years as Governor of Massachusetts shows how moderate he can be. But he’s been forced to sell his soul to the Tea Party in order to get the nomination in the first place.]

    Well, as I say, it’s not Romney who scares me, it’s the people he will bring with him. He has extremely neoconservative foreign policy advisors and he will most definitely defer to Ryan’s bunch when it comes to social issues (economic management is what Romney cares about – that’s the area he will assume total control over.)

  50. @BarackObama: Huge news: our grassroots campaign outraised the Romney campaign in August—the first time we’ve done so since April.

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