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The odds appear to be stacking up against Mitt Romney winning the 2012 presidential election on Tuesday.
Among political journalists, campaign reporters and most pollsters, there’s a congealing conventional wisdom that President Barack Obama is about to be re-elected.
On Sunday, new national polls from Pew put Barack Obama up three, and NBC/Wall Street Journal, which gave him a one-point advantage. Fox, Rasmussen, GWU/Politico and ABC/Washington Post finds a tie nationally.
More worrying for Mitt Romney is the state polls, particularly in Ohio, where the RealClearPolitics average has Barack Obama with a lead of 2.8%.
If everything goes Mitt Romney’s way on election day it is possible he could achieve out a victory that would stun Democrats and turn the polling world upside down.
Based on conversations with the Romney campaign, including a frank discussion with a senior Mitt Romney adviser, here’s how they see the Republican nominee winning.
Of course, campaign aides spin reporters because they want their optimistic scenarios to become part of a media narrative that helps drive voters. They are also part of a self-reinforcing campaign bubble in which belief in eventual victory is a prerequisite of getting through grueling days.
But the adviser quoted here, for what it is worth, correctly identified to me weeks beforehand that the first debate would be a game-changing moment for Mitt Romney, has always predicted a very close race and is honest enough to identify states such as Nevada which Romney probably won’t win.
If we look at the 2008 electoral college map, when Barack Obama beat Senator John McCain by an electoral college landslide of 365 to 173 (and seven percentage points in the popular vote), we can view the terrain on which the 2012 contest is being fought.
The distribution of electoral college votes (which are based on congressional districts and U.S. Senate seats) has changed slightly in 2012 to produce this map. Because of the changes, Barack Obama’s advantage has shrunk to 359 to 179 in the electoral college. The winner needs 270 votes. So for Mitt Romney to win, he needs to take 91 electoral college votes from the states that Barack Obama won in 2008.
We can immediately give one vote in Nebraska (based on winning a congressional district) and 11 in Indiana to Mitt Romney. Barack Obama is not campaigning for those. Next up is 15 in North Carolina. Barack Obama won it by just 14,000 votes in 2008 and early voting patterns indicate he’s probably going to lose there.
Then we have Florida – its 29 votes are a huge prize. The latest Miami Herald/El Nuevo Herald poll has Barack Obama being crushed by six points there. That’s the next state Mitt Romney needs. The Romney adviser was very confident, saying: “North Carolina’s baked. Florida’s baked.”
From there, it gets more difficult. Virginia, with 13 votes, is tighter than Florida but, again, early voting patterns suggest Mitt Romney will win it, though not by much. The Romney adviser said that “Virginia’s baked” though he added that it was “much closer than Florida”.
At this point, the Obama campaign would be really sweating. But so too would Mitt Romney’s team. We’d be down to Ohio, just as President George W. Bush was in 2004. This year, it has 18 electoral college votes.
If Mitt Romney bags Ohio, he’s on 266 electoral college votes and has multiple opportunities to get the four more he needs. Colorado’s nine, New Hampshire’s four, Iowa’s six and Wisconsin’s 10 look most likely. It’s very hard to see Mitt Romney winning Florida, Virginia and Ohio and Barack Obama keeping the White House.
Mitt Romney’s aides seem very bullish about Iowa – more so, even, than Colorado, where they say he took a hit in their internal polling with women independents after Barack Obama’s handling of Hurricane Sandy. The latest Des Moines Register poll gives Barack Obama a five-point advantage. But the Romney campaigns that the same poll put Barack Obama up 17 in 2008 and he won the state by 10 points.
How Mitt Romney can still win US presidential election
Privately, the Romney campaign has effectively conceded Nevada, which has six votes.
“Nevada, we’ll probably fall short,” said the Romney adviser.
“That’s just tough.”
Mitt Romney hasn’t travelled there since October 24th, just as Barack Obama has stayed away from North Carolina.
More remarkably, the adviser said that Minnesota, 10 votes, and Pennsylvania, 20 votes, were distinct possibilities. He even predicted a possible win in Minnesota.
Pennsylvania is intriguing. There’s a Susquehanna poll that puts the two candidates dead level. Barack Obama has to be a heavy favorite – no Republican presidential candidate has won there since George H.W. Bush in 1988
But the Obama campaign has sent Bill Clinton to do four events in Pennsylvania on the eve of Election Day. After Barack Obama himself – and perhaps even ahead of Obama – Clinton is their most valuable campaign resource. There is clearly some worry there.
So that’s the electoral college arithmetic. There is not too much difference between the way the two campaigns view it.
The more difficult case to make is how Mitt Romney’s vote is lifted so that on the spectrum of Barack Obama states to capture (the order in terms of confidence seems to be Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Iowa, Ohio, Colorado, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Nevada and Michigan) it is a tide that rises above the Ohio threshold.
For that, several things have to happen: the battleground polls have to be wrong; undecideds have to vote for Mitt Romney; Romney’s turnout has to be very high; Barack Obama’s vote has to be depressed.
Can so many polls be wrong? The short answer is yes. It is worth remembering that in January 2008 virtually no one in the political world believed that Hillary Clinton could win the New Hampshire primary over Barack Obama, fresh off his Iowa victory. But win it she did.
This year, apart from Gallup and Rasmussen, pollsters have consistently over-sampled Democrats compared to Republicans.
The Romney adviser said: “The samples that they’re using are geared towards 2008 results. So you get Democrats plus four on Pew, you’ve got Democrats plus eight on PPP.
“It’s going to be a Republican plus one or Republicans plus two election. It’s not 2008, it’s not 2004, it’s not 2000. It’s a new election. It’s 2012 and a completely different dynamic. Every election we re-write history on turnout.
“Gallup looked at it a week ago and decided it was going to be a more Republican electorate and they had it right.”
The closer you get to an election, the more likely undecideds are to break against the incumbent. Mitt Romney will also have voter enthusiasm on his side. Whether that’s enough, remains an open question but the Romney campaign thinks so.
“What’s going on here is when you have intensity and momentum,” said the Romney adviser.
“You ask voters who they’re voting for and they say 48, 47 points Obama. And then you look at the people who are eight, nine,10 on the intensity scale, Republicans have a high single digits to low double digits advantage.
“That’s what you see in the early voting. We keep narrowing the gap of the early vote advantage in some of these states. That trend line goes right into election day when you just don’t want to get in the way of a Republican heading into the polls.”
Certainly, in Florida, North Carolina and Colorado, the early voting evidence is encouraging for Mitt Romney supporters. In Ohio, the picture is more mixed. The Romney adviser predicted a win in Ohio by as little at 20,000 votes. In 2004, George W. Bush won it by 119,00 votes and in 2008 Barack Obama won it by 262,000.
It appears that Mitt Romney was damaged by Hurricane Sandy – he was virtually absent from the television screens for four days, the discussion turned away from jobs and the economy and Barack Obama’s double act with Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey burnished his bipartisan credentials.
But the Romney adviser said that this has been turned around.
“Sandy didn’t flip us with independents but it narrowed. Then on Friday we got back in business with the <<revenge>> ad. Finally, we got back into business.
“Then Mitt just hit it in speech after speech and it got people back, particularly independents. Again saw Obama as divisive, petty, the negative partisan guy that they’d been seeing since the November 2nd debate.”
Can the Romney campaign envisage Barack Obama winning? The adviser responded: “I don’t see it. But his easiest path to that would be Ohio.
“He takes Ohio because Democratic men, hardworking lower middle class men, we don’t get the margin we think we’re getting. He somehow ekes it out. He gets Nevada, he gets Colorado, he gets New Hampshire. That’s probably the scenario.”
The Obama campaign believes that is indeed the scenario that will deliver them the White House. On Tuesday, we will know which of the two very different versions – almost parallel universes – of this race presented by the two campaign worlds will be the one that represents reality.
The mother of US Navy Seal Glen Doherty killed in last month’s Libya consulate attack has said his death has been used by the Romney campaign for political purposes.
Mitt Romney has been citing his meeting some years ago with Seal Glen Doherty.
His campaign said the candidate would respect Barbara Doherty’s wishes and stop mentioning her son.
The attack on the consulate in Benghazi on 11 September has become a political issue ahead of the election.
Glen Doherty was killed in the attack in Benghazi along with Ambassador Christopher Stevens and two other officials.
“I don’t trust Romney,” Barbara Doherty told Boston news station WHDH.
“He shouldn’t make my son’s death part of his political agenda. It’s wrong to use these brave young men, who wanted freedom for all, to degrade Obama,” she said.
Campaigning on Tuesday in the state of Iowa, Mitt Romney said that instead of running away from danger during the Benghazi consulate attack, Glen Doherty had run towards it.
He reportedly used the anecdote as a metaphor for what Republicans must do to regain the White House in November’s poll.
“They didn’t hunker down where they were in safety,” the former Massachusetts governor was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.
“They rushed there to go help. This is the American way. We go where there’s trouble.”
“We go where we’re needed. And right now we’re needed. Right now the American people need us.”
Mitt Romney is reported to have mentioned Glen Doherty at other events on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The Romney campaign said in a statement on Wednesday: “Governor Romney was inspired by the memory of meeting Glen Doherty and shared his story and that memory, but we respect the wishes of Mrs. Doherty.”
A campaign official confirmed Mitt Romney would not re-tell the anecdote.
Friends of Glen Doherty have spoken publicly about his encounter with Mitt Romney at a Christmas party.
His friend, Elf Ellefsen, told a Seattle radio station: “He said it was very comical. Mitt Romney approached him ultimately four times, using this private gathering as a political venture to further his image.”
“He kept introducing himself as Mitt Romney, a political figure. The same introduction, the same opening line. Glen believed it to be very insincere and stale,” Elf Ellefsen added, according to ABC News.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has released his much-anticipated 2011 tax return, which shows he paid a rate of 14.1%.
Mitt Romney paid $1.9 million in taxes in 2011, on $13.7 million of income.
The private equity tycoon has already released his 2010 tax return, for which he paid about $3 million, a 13.9% rate.
The top rate of income tax in the US is 35%, but Mitt Romney lives mainly on income derived from his investments, for which only 15% tax is payable.
Critics, including President Barack Obama, whom Mitt Romney will challenge for the White House in November, have called on him to release more tax returns.
Mitt Romney has released his much-anticipated 2011 tax return
Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax rate of 14.1% compares with a previous estimate of 15.4% for the year by his aides. The Romneys filed their 2011 return with the Internal Revenue Service on Friday after applying for an extension earlier in the year.
The campaign also released a letter from his accountants with a summary of his returns from 1990-2009, which said he paid an effective average of 20.2% over the period, with the lowest return at 13.66%.
The move came amid attempts by the Romney campaign to shift the focus of recent days away from remarks he made at a private donor dinner.
In the video secretly recorded earlier this year, he disparages Barack Obama voters, saying they pay no income tax.
Mitt Romney’s critics say he should follow the example of his father, former Michigan Governor George Romney, who released a dozen years of tax returns during his own unsuccessful run for president in 1968.
But the former Massachusetts governor has said he is following 2008 Republican White House candidate John McCain’s example of releasing two years of taxes.
Barack Obama’s 2011 tax return showed he paid an effective rate of 20.5%, on an income of $789,674.
On average, US middle-income families, those making from $50,000 to $75,000 a year, pay 12.8%, according to congressional research.
As he released his 2010 return in January this year, Mitt Romney said he had paid “all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more”.
But according to Brad Malt, the trustee that controls Mitt Romney’s wealth as he runs for president, the Romneys donated $4 million to charity in 2011, claiming $2.25 million of it as a deduction.
“The Romneys thus limited their deduction of charitable contributions to conform to the Governor’s statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years,” Brad Malt said.
The campaign has stressed that the blind trust run by Brad Malt means that the candidate is making no decisions on how his money is invested.
Tax law experts say the release of the 2011 return – and the summary of the past 20 years – will do little to silence questions about Mitt Romney’s past tax liability, including the source of a $100 million retirement account and the tax advantages of his offshore investments.
Yahoo News has fired its Washington bureau chief David Chalian for saying White House hopeful Mitt Romney was “happy to have a party with black people drowning”.
Caught on an open microphone, David Chalian was discussing Hurricane Isaac, which hit Louisiana with the Republican convention under way.
Yahoo said the remark did not represent the company’s views and that it had apologized to the Romney campaign.
David Chalian said on Wednesday he was “profoundly sorry”.
Yahoo News has fired its Washington bureau chief David Chalian for saying White House hopeful Mitt Romney was "happy to have a party with black people drowning"
His gaffe came on Tuesday evening, as Yahoo News was preparing to begin its live coverage of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, in association with ABC News.
In a video posted on YouTube, the commentators can be heard discussing how Isaac, which has since been downgraded to a tropical storm, was bearing down on the US Gulf Coast.
As footage is broadcast of Mitt Romney and his wife Ann, one voice can be heard saying: “They’re not concerned at all.”
Laughter is heard in the background as David Chalian says: “They are happy to have a party with black people drowning.”
He later apologized on his Facebook page for “making an inappropriate and thoughtless joke”.
“I was commenting on the challenge of staging a convention during a hurricane and about campaign optics,” he said.
A Yahoo spokeswoman told the Associated Press: “He has been terminated effective immediately.
“We have already reached out to the Romney campaign, and we apologize to Mitt Romney, his staff, their supporters and anyone who was offended.”
Mitt Romney was officially selected as the Republican presidential nominee on Tuesday, the first full day of the convention, which started a day late amid concerns over Isaac.
Mitt Romney’s campaign increased its fundraising lead over Barack Obama in June, official numbers released on Monday show.
Mitt Romney and the Republicans raised $106 million, $35 million more than Barack Obama and the Democrats, who raised $71 million.
Both camps raised more than in May, when the Romney bid took in $77 million and the Obama camp $60 million.
The totals exclude millions raised by independent groups that support each candidate.
Mitt Romney's campaign increased its fundraising lead over Barack Obama in June
The Obama campaign released the June numbers in an email to donors.
“If we lose this election, it will be because we didn’t close the gap enough when we had the chance,” the email says in a call for donations.
Barack Obama’s campaign has been regularly warning supporters that he is in danger of becoming the first sitting president in history to be outspent by his opponent.
Mitt Romney and the Republicans have an estimated $160 million cash in the bank to spend on the campaign, they confirmed on Monday.
Despite its fundraising bonanza, correspondents say the Romney campaign has struggled recently to gain the initiative.
He has faced renewed scrutiny over his financial affairs in recent days, and several polls show the president retains a lead in some key swing states.
However, a poor jobs report on Friday was seen as a reminder to Barack Obama that the US economy remains weak just four months before the 6 November election.
Mitt Romney and the Republicans raised a combined $100 million in June, laying down the gauntlet to a Barack Obama campaign that is scrambling to keep pace.
The figure excludes the millions raised by groups that support the Republican presidential candidate.
President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party have not yet released their fundraising results for June.
Barack Obama spent the day in Ohio as he launched the first bus tour of his campaign for re-election in November.
In May, the Romney campaign out-fundraised its rival, attracting $77 million against the Obama team’s $60 million.
Barack Obama has been warning supporters that he is in danger of becoming the first sitting president in history to be outspent by his opponent.
Mitt Romney and the Republicans raised a combined $100 million in June
According to Mitt Romney’s campaign aides, much of the money raised in June came from new donors, Politico reported.
Several states, including the key battlegrounds of Colorado, Michigan and Ohio, exceeded their fundraising goals, they added.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama pitched a positive message on Ohio’s economic recovery and the comeback of the state’s car industry.
Ohio’s unemployment rate of 7.3% compares with a national average of 8.2%.
Ohio is a key battleground in presidential elections – no Republican has ever won the White House without capturing it.
A Quinnipiac University poll of Ohio voters last week had Barack Obama leading his rival by 47% to 38% in the state. Earlier, the Obama campaign had run a barrage of attacks on Mitt Romney’s business record.
“I’m betting you’re not going to lose interest,” Barack Obama told voters in Maumee, Ohio.
“I’m betting you’re not going to lose heart. I still believe in you, I’m betting on you.”
The president also touched on his landmark healthcare reform act, which was upheld by the Supreme Court last week.
“It is going to make the vast majority of Americans more secure,” he told supporters. Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal the law if he wins office.
On Friday, Barack Obama will finish his bus tour with appearances in Poland, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, said the president had “no new answers” for the economy.
Despite its fundraising bonanza, correspondents say the Romney campaign has struggled recently to gain the initiative.
His team was seen as having been put on the back foot by the president’s order last month halting deportations for children of illegal immigrants.
The Romney camp also delivered conflicting responses to Supreme Court ruling last week on healthcare.
And there were negative headlines this week over a Vanity Fair investigation reporting that much of Mitt Romney’s personal fortune was hidden in a network of opaque offshore investment havens.
Conservative concerns over the former private equity chief’s campaign were vented in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
It accused Mitt Romney’s staff of “slowly squandering an historic opportunity”. The newspaper is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who called for a Romney campaign shake-up, in a tweet earlier this week.
Meanwhile, pictures of Mitt Romney on holiday with his family this week in New Hampshire prompted conservative radio talk host Laura Ingraham to tell listeners:
“There’s no week to spare, we have a country to save.”
With the economy such a major issue in the coming election, both campaigns will be eagerly awaiting figures due on Friday showing if there was any rise in hiring by US employers during June.
Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino boss, who was one of Newt Gingrich’s top backers, has become Mitt Romney’s largest donor.
Sheldon Adelson has handed a $10 million donation to Restore Our Future, a super PAC devoted to the election campaign of the former Massachusetts governor, according to the Wall Street Journal.
While the gift could make a big difference to Mitt Romney’s election hopes, it is little more than a drop in the ocean for Sheldon Adelson, whose fortune is believed to add up to $20 billion.
Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino boss, who was one of Newt Gingrich's top backers, has become Mitt Romney's largest donor
Sheldon Adelson made his fortune with Las Vegas Sands, which owns enormous casinos in Macau and Singapore as well as in Las Vegas.
The tycoon was by far the biggest supporter of Newt Gingrich’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, propping it up almost single-handedly with around $21 million worth of funding.
Sheldon Adelson, who appears to be primarily motivated by support for Israel, has apparently pledged to give a total of $100 million to Republicans this election year.
