It's Absurd to Think Obama Has Already Won

By David Paul Kuhn - 4 March 2012

Of course Republicans can still win the presidency.

Conservative opinion maker George Will compares the GOP’s presidential fate to Barry Goldwater’s flop. Many key Republicans reportedly believe they are indeed "consigned to defeat." Conservative blogger Erick Erickson promises that defeat if the GOP nominates Mitt Romney. Liberal analyst Ruy Teixeira predicts that Obama will retain the White House as decisively as he attained it four years ago. 

Veteran columnist Robert Samuelson nicely summarized the jelling consensus. “If you believe the conventional wisdom, the presidential election is virtually finished,” he wrote, adding, “I'm inclined to accept it.”

Samuelson should not. And neither should you. Presume Romney is that GOP nominee. Obama is the slight favorite. But only slight. The 2012 general election will likely be what it was always going to be: a close fight on the conventional red-blue battleground.

Obama currently leads Romney in head-to-head matchups, 49 to 44 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. But these early surveys do not historically predict the future. Eight years ago, in early March 2004, John Kerry was ahead of George W. Bush in the Gallop poll, 52 percent to 44 percent among likely voters. Kerry led nearly every poll in July of that year. And we know how that went.

The economy consumes today’s American mind. And there is reason to be sanguine. But the electoral question is not whether the American economy is improving. The strategic question is: Whose economy is improving?

Pundits focus too much on the wrong numbers. There is no predictive economic tea leaf for who wins the White House. But it certainly is not how your stock portfolio is doing. This is a bullish period in the market. Dow 13,000! Yet two-thirds of Americans believe the United States is now in a recession, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll. As I’ve written before, gas prices correlate far more than the stock market or the unemployment rate to how the public views a president. Put another way: A president would rather have gas prices down $2 a gallon than the Dow Jones average up another thousand points.

The national average for a gallon of regular gas rose 30 cents in the past month to about $3.75. Yet gas need not rise to $5 a gallon for Republicans to win the White House. The economy need not plummet.

Obama is not a strong incumbent by historic measure. His job approval rating is relatively steady in the Gallup poll. It averaged 45 percent over January and February. Jimmy Carter’s approval rating averaged 55 percent over those same two months in 1980. And, again, we know how that went.

Samuelson hesitated to make the bald prediction that Obama will have a second term because there is not yet a “collapse in Republican support.” But the GOP house will not collapse.

The modern presidential electorate has secure floors. It fortified Obama’s approval rating during his hardest times. It kept Bush above 40 percent until August 2005.

This is not LBJ's era. Lyndon Johnson had an approval rating of about 70 percent when he routed Goldwater. That’s 25 percentage points above Obama’s! Johnson had the legacy of JFK at his back. More than a third of the nation identified as liberal then. Only a fifth does today. 

Goldwater also ran in a time before the two parties were hyper-polarized. Almost half of all Republicans approved of Johnson around Election Day 1964. By comparison, only about one in 10 Democrats approved of Bush on Election Day 2004. The same share of Republicans currently approve of Obama, according to Gallup.

Thus we will not see a sequel to Goldwater. Obama would likely defeat Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich with relative ease. But even those Republicans would win Texas and most of middle America. Goldwater did not.

George Will posits that the GOP should focus on congressional elections. But challenging an incumbent can reduce his coattails. Modern presidential races can rarely be divorced from Senate contests. Since FDR, no incumbent has also won re-election while losing more than two Senate seats. Republicans need four seats to win back the upper chamber. Republicans will make a race of 2012 because they must.

We cannot yet know how much of Obama’s 2008 coalition will return to him in this race. His historic gains in 2008 came after the market crash. Those gains were gone as the 2010 midterm election neared. Obama suffered historic losses among whites and independents. He's gained some ground since. It’s still a long way back.

The demographics of head-to-head polls offer no answers, until roughly autumn, for the same reason we can’t see the future in these early surveys. But Republicans should hardly feel "consigned to defeat." Obama won 52 percent of independents in 2008. Only 42 percent of them currently approve of him, according to Gallup.

 

Yet elections are choices. Obama has hit his stride. He’s lofty, confident and optimistic of late. “I placed my bet on the American worker,” Obama told union members this past week. “I believed in you.”

 

Obama’s stride stands out against the unusually flawed opposition. Even Bob Dole had an American tale to tell. He survived on the true battlefield and came up the “hard way.” Dole was the small town boy gone big.

Romney’s story is privileged boy gone very big. And it’s high finance big. That "big," like big government, is the wrong sort of big today. Romney’s own words have only made his story harder to pitch. Yet none of Romney’s weaknesses are electorally fatal. The alternative will assure that the conservative base backs him.

Pundits often talk of Romney’s sullied image. The public’s perception of him -- thanks to his gaffes -- didn’t have to be that bad. Americans’ unfavorable view of Romney rose to 47 percent in the mid-February Gallup poll, along with other surveys. But his image remains malleable. Bill Clinton had an unfavorable rating of 49 percent in April and June 1992. Negative views of Clinton lessened as Election Day neared. Meanwhile, the share of Americans with a favorable view of him shifted from 41 percent in June to 54 percent in early November 1992.

Republicans will now try Clinton’s role. They will seek to pin the recession’s costs on the incumbent. Democrats take heart in an improving public outlook. The share of Americans who believe the nation is on the wrong track has decreased about 10 points in multiple polls. But about six in 10 Americans still say they are dissatisfied with the direction of the country. That’s the same share as one year ago. So these numbers can improve. But they can also worsen even without a dramatic event. 

Political scientist James Campbell, an expert on election forecasting, calculates that the weakest third-year economic growth (change in GDP adjusted for inflation) since 1952 for winning incumbents has been 2.5 percent (Clinton in 1996 and Bush in 2004). The economy grew 1.7 percent in Obama’s third year.

As Campbell put it: “Despite their protracted and bitter nomination contest in the Republican Party, the overall outlook on the 2012 election at this time indicates a very tight election with only a slight edge to President Obama.”

Most election experts would agree. Incumbent presidents have won nearly three-quarters of their re-election campaigns since the Civil War. The economy is trending in the right direction, providing gas prices level off. The electoral map favors Democrats. Obama has a route around losing Florida and Ohio, however difficult that would prove. Republicans cannot lose either state and win.

Romney is the least flawed option for Republicans. But his flaws are significant enough to matter. They did for Kerry. Yet he still made a race of it. Shift 60,000 votes in Ohio and it would have been President Kerry. 

George Will once said with typical wit, “The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.” His latest column may betray the pessimist in him. It would be foolish for Republicans to depend on that pleasant surprise. But it’s also foolish to think the GOP has already lost.

David Paul Kuhn is the Chief Political Correspondent for RealClearPolitics and the author of The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma. He can be reached at david@realclearpolitics.com and his writing followed via RSS.