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“All campaigns have their ups and downs, but the last three weeks for Mitt Romney have been about as brutal as we can remember for any presidential candidate, especially this close to the election. First, the biggest speech of Romney’s life got overshadowed by the Clint Eastwood stunt. Then came President Obama’s significant bounce in the polls after the two political conventions. After that, Romney found himself on the defensive for his reaction to embassy attacks in Egypt and Libya. Next, Politico reported about infighting and disorganization inside the Romney campaign. Finally, all of these events were capped off yesterday by the surreptitiously recorded video of Romney…”
“What is so potentially deadly about this video is the timing, because it comes as the Romney campaign was already viewed to be behind and in crisis. Back in late July, we wrote that the presidential contest had entered halftime with Obama leading, 14-13. Now after the 3rd Quarter (the Ryan pick, the conventions, and post-convention period), Obama has scored two uncontested touchdowns, bringing it to 28-13. And now we head to the 4th Quarter (the debates).”
Prime Minister David Cameron and the Brits are no Romney fans, according to Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who relates Cameron’s remarks:
Said Weinstein: “I witnessed Prime Minister saying to a group of people, myself included, that Mitt Romney had that unique distinction of uniting all of England against him with his various remarks. On behalf of my love of England, I have to support the President who is anything but making faux-pas.”
“Because he is being graded on a curve with a bunch of guys who jump into the Sea of Galilee because they want to be closer to God.” — Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), quoted by The New Republic, on why Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has developed a “big thinker reputation.”
Ezra Klein reviews a new book by Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien called “The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter,” and concludes: Mitt Romney is in trouble.
But I didn’t realize quite how dire Romney’s situation was until I began reading [Erikson and Wlezien’s work].
What Erikson and Wlezien did is rather remarkable: They collected pretty much every publicly available poll conducted during the last 200 days of the past 15 presidential elections and then ran test after test on the data to see what we could say about the trajectory of presidential elections. Their results make Romney’s situation look very dire.
For instance: The least-stable period of the campaign isn’t early in the year or in the fall. It’s the summer. That’s because the conventions have a real and lasting effect on a campaign.
“The party that gains pre- to post-convention on average improves by 5.2 percentage points as measured from our pre- and post-convention benchmarks,” write Erikson and Wlezien. “On average, the party that gains from before to after the conventions maintains its gain in the final week’s polls. In other words, its poll numbers do not fade but instead stay constant post-conventions to the final week.”
This year, it was the Democrats who made the biggest gains from before to after the conventions. Obama is leading by 3 percent in the Real Clear Politics average of polls, about double his lead before the Republican convention. If that doesn’t fade by the end of the week or so — that is, if it proves to be a real lead rather than a post-convention bounce — then there’s simply no example in the past 15 elections of a candidate coming back from a post-convention deficit to win the popular vote.
This is about the point where I’m supposed to write: That said, the race remains close, and the debates are coming soon. It’s still anyone’s game.
But the most surprising of Erikson and Wlezien’s results, and the most dispiriting for the Romney campaign, is that unlike the conventions, the debates don’t tend to matter.