State of the Race

The race for 2012 had remarkable stability for the majority of the campaign from the end of the Republican primaries in March and April all the way through until the Republican Convention in August. During that time, President Obama built a durable Electoral College advantage keeping the majority of his 2008 coalition intact in places like Ohio, Virginia, Colorado and Ohio. Coming out of the Democratic convention in September, Obama spiked significantly across the board and he opened up wide leads in all the swing states and even led in North Carolina for about a week or two. 

Then the first debate happened and Obama plummeted back to Earth. He peaked on October 2^nd, where he was at a near landslide electoral total of 347 (you need 270 to win). After the first debate, Obama plummeted almost 80 electoral votes in a few days. He was hovering around the 270 magic line for about 2 weeks while Romney opened up a slight but consistent national poll lead. At the time, this led to hundreds of articles being written about the possibility of the second popular vote/electoral college split in 12 years. But in the past 2 weeks, as more and more undecideds finally settle on a candidate, a funny thing seems to be happening. President Obama is actually beginning to regain a lot of the ground that he lost after the first debate.

(Please view this chart from Princeton's highly accurate election blog for a visual representation of Obama's trajectory during this campaign.)

There will be a lot of theories about why this happened after tomorrow night (Election Day). Indeed, the Republican Party's chief strategists can read the tea leaves better than most and are already preemptively blaming a Romney loss on Hurricane Sandy. But whatever the reason, Obama’s climb back into the lead is unarguable at this point. Today, he leads in the polls by more than at any time since October 8^th. This says to me that Romney failed to close successfully on the most fundamental duty for a challenging politician; to be viewed as a credible alternative to the incumbent. This is a syndrome that most Democrats are well acquainted with as the same problem afflicted John Kerry in 2004 and most recently Tom Barrett during the recall against Scott Walker in 2012. If the electorate doesn’t believe you have a vision for the future (as opposed to simply being a vessel to channel hatred for the incumbent), you will not win. This is why it’s especially hard to unseat an incumbent president (absent a third party) and why that feat has been achieved so rarely in our nation’s history.

Out of 20 presidents to seek re-election since 1900, only five presidents have lost. Taft in 1912, Hoover in 1932, Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980 and George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992. First off, 2 of those five (Taft and George Bush Sr.) lost due to third parties. Ford was never elected in the first place (therefore had no natural base of support) and had just pardoned the most hated President in American history. Only in 2 cases, Hoover and Carter did a challenger manage to unseat a sitting President “cleanly.” These were two of the most extraordinary years in American politics. The first election during the Great Depression created a tidal wave of Democratic rule in the United States for 36 years (see The New Deal Coalition). In 1980, using the Southern Strategy, Ronald Reagan destroyed the New Deal coalition for good, siphoned off a large chunk of the Democratic Party and shifted the entire trajectory of the country for 28 years, until the election of Barack Obama in 2008.