Portland Mercury on Twitter Portland Mercury on Facebook Portland Mercury on Instagram

This Week in the Mercury

Portland as Fuck

Columns

Portland as Fuck

Insurance


Pitcher Plants and Pearls

Music

Pitcher Plants and Pearls

The First Jewel from Morning Ritual



  |  

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Election 2012 It's Way Too Early to Care About National Polls...

Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 9:44 AM

...because the national campaigns haven't even really started yet. But there's an interesting little fact tucked into this Politico story about a poll showing Romney and Obama running neck and neck:

But the president enjoys more positive support than the former Massachusetts governor, with 74 percent of his supporters saying they would be voting “for” Obama and 21 percent saying they would be voting “against Romney.” Among the GOP hopeful’s supporters, just 33 percent said they were “for Romney,” while a whopping 58 percent said their vote was more “against Obama.”

Unless you have some strange circumstances—a third party candidate, say, or severely bad news for the White House—it's really hard to win an election when your candidate's most striking feature is he is not the incumbent. Romney should be up in the polls for likability right now. He's got the press in his pocket, and he's facing a handful of continually shrinking, and very unlikable, opponents. If he's not dominating in likability now, he's only got one more chance to make up those numbers with his base, and that's the Republican Convention, when the party presents their candidate's biography and mission statement. It's hard to think how they'll manage to package Romney—wealthy son of a failed presidential candidate—into something eminently likable.

Comments (3)

Showing 1-3 of 3

 
Subscribe to this thread:
By Email
With RSS
Showing 1-3 of 3

Comments are closed.

Our Friends

Our Enemies

All contents © Index Newspapers, LLC

115 SW Ash St. Suite 600
Portland, OR 97204

Contact Info | Privacy Policy | Production Guidelines | Terms of Use | Takedown Policy