MORNING MINDMELD: If you're a political junkie, enjoy it, soak it in: In our lifetimes, there may never be another race that looks this close for the final two weekends. Yesterday, two of the most widely followed polling analysts drew opposite conclusions about who has Big Mo:
--Nate Silver, who gives Obama a 73% chance of winning, argued in the morning that the move to Romney had "stopped": "What isn't very likely ... is for one candidate to lose ground in five of six polls if the race is still moving toward him. ... [W]e can debate whether Mr. Obama has a pinch of momentum or whether the race is instead flat, but it's improbable that Mr. Romney would have a day like [Wednesday] if he still had momentum."http://nyti.ms/Y2zNij
--Six and half hours later, ABC's Gary Langer popped his analysis of the latest ABC-WP tracking poll, which had : "[T]he momentum on underlying issues and attributes is Romney's. Romney's gains are clear especially in results on the economy."http://abcn.ws/ROKMZa
SO AS A PUBLIC SERVICE, here is each campaign's latest THEORY OF THE CASE, in 890 words:
ROMNEY POLITICAL DIRECTOR RICH BEESON, in a phone interview with Playbook from Boston HQ on Wednesday: "Florida is like an aircraft carrier: Once you start turning it, it's hard to stop, and it's been turning now for about the last 10 days. ... The Dems are talking about how they've closed the gap on absentee, but since the early vote window's gone from two weeks to one week, all that they're doing is taking their early vote and voting them absentee. ... We're ahead of where we were in '08, and ... our Election Day turnout is going to be very strong. ... Every day, [Florida] gets better, and as Haley Barbour says, 'Good gets better and bad gets worse.' ... I think at the end of the day, North Carolina is probably a 53-47 state. ...
"Virginia is a lot like Florida : It's starting to head the right direction. They tried to cut us with Northern Virginia, those suburban women. We've held serve: We're holding our numbers in Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William. We will win Loudoun and Prince William counties. Then, as you go down to Hampton Roads and Virginia Beach, those Obama defense cuts are really starting to undermine him. ... And then, in Henrico County ... and those collar counties around Richmond - [including] Chesterfield -- we're going to ratchet it up to Bush turnout numbers in there. Then, from Danville on down to Bluefield and Tri-Cities, anybody down there who's voting for Obama is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders [because of coal]. And so, we're going to have historic margins out of those. ... [W]e're talking 70-80 percent ...
"New Hampshire , ... we were tied there before we went and bought the TV, and [are] going up with a heavy, heavy radio buy. ... Wisconsin is a tie. There's no two ways about it, and the good news for us there is where we have room to grow is, the further north and the further west you go, those places where we cut up Santorum in the primary, we can still get some Republicans to come home. We're going to run better in Madison, Milwaukee, and Green Bay than Republicans normally run. ... In the primary, we were called the 'Massachusetts moderate.' [That's helpful in Wisconsin's] urban and even close-in suburban areas ... Same thing in Madison, Green Bay, and Milwaukee. Those were the only three DMAs we went to in Wisconsin in the primary, and that's where we won the Wisconsin primary... Romney runs better in those urban areas than the Republican presidential candidates have for the last two cycles. ... Paul Ryan being able to peel off blue-collar Democratic votes, ... that's just going to be icing on the cake.
"Iowa is one of my favorite states because it's obviously the state that launched Barack Obama in the caucuses ... Now, he is locked in a tie race. ... [I]n another week or so, I'm going to be prepared to move Iowa into our column. They have to go into Election Day with a 15 percent partisan advantage on absentee ballots. ... Anything over it they'll win; anything under it, we've got a shot at winning, because on Election Day turnout, Republicans in Iowa vote on Election Day; Democrats like to vote absentee. This is the first time we've ever had a registration advantage in Iowa ... In Colorado, which is my home state, there's a number of factors there that are working against the President. ... Again, it gets back to that candidate who runs better in urban areas than we've seen in the past. ...
"Nevada has been the toughest nut for us to crack , but having said all of that, we're still within a couple of points in Nevada. ... We never won early voting in Washoe County one day in 2008; we've now won it two days in a row. ... The other thing about Nevada to keep in mind is that the rural, the cow counties out there, they vote on Election Day. So, you've got 11 percent of the vote that's just going to sit there until Election Day, and we're going to win those rurals by big margins. There's a lot of LDS out there, very conservative voters ... I saw somebody move [Nevada] into the Obama column the other day and I found that sort of interesting, especially since they've done the same with Iowa and Ohio and add all those back.
"I think it was two weeks ago that people were asking if we were going to have to pull out of Ohio, and now ... it is a tie in Ohio ... [T]hey're counting party registration as a vote for them. So, [for] a Democrat early vote or a Democrat absentee ballot, they're saying: It's ours. But you look at the Mahoning Valley from Youngstown, down to the Charleston and Huntington media market, the further south you go, the more coal there is ... We are peeling off an enormous amount of Democrat votes in those coal counties ... The fight in Ohio is going to be Franklin County and then what margin we can come out of Cuyahoga with. ... They've dropped the auto bailout on us, but ... there's only so long you can ride that one-trick pony, and they just kept pounding away at it, and so that's baked in right now and we're tied."
OBAMA CAMPAIGN MANAGER JIM MESSINA, on a press conference call Tuesday:"We are outperforming our early vote margins in key states, compared to 2008. We're ahead of where we were against McCain, and more importantly, we're ahead of Mitt Romney. Romney may be winning more raw votes than McCain did at this point, but ... the numbers tell a very clear story. The electorate is bigger this year, and our vote margins are, too. In every presidential election since 1984, the turnout in a presidential year has eclipsed turnout in midterm elections, and in every presidential election since '96, the voter turnout has increased significantly over the previous election. In fact, more people are going to vote early this cycle than in 2008. And more of them will vote for President Obama in the states that will decide this election. Every single day now is Election Day, and voters in Iowa and Nevada and Wisconsin and Ohio are voting ...
"We are not leaving anywhere we are tied or ahead. Romney hasn't been unable to knock us out of a single battleground, but we've forced him to continue to spend significant resources in states like North Carolina that the Romney campaign said they wanted locked up a long time ago. By contrast, we've gotten him to pull resources out of states like Michigan, Pennsylvania ... and New Mexico. ... The Romney campaign has bet that young people and minorities won't turn out. The early vote numbers are already proving the folly of that gamble, and the wisdom of our plan. ... Early vote is not taking a final universe of voters and only changing the day they vote. ... What early vote does is help us get out low-propensity voters - voters called 'sporadic' voters - which broadens are universe and freezes up more get out the vote resources later and especially on Election Day. ... Public polls show we are winning early votes in Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin. President is winning overall by 15 to 35 points among those who have already voted, and we are winning in-person early vote everywhere they have it. In Ohio, early vote turn-out is higher in counties that voted for Obama in 2008 than Republican counties. ...
"Republicans traditionally mail in ballots , especially in states like Florida and North Carolina, but Democrats are performing better than we did in 2008. ... In [Florida in] 2008 right now we were behind in vote-by-mail by almost a quarter a million of votes - that margin is now 38,000 ... We've dramatically reduced the Republican advantage. And what all that means, is the math for Republicans, and what they have to beat us by on Election Day, gets harder and harder, especially in states like Nevada, Iowa and Ohio. ... Republicans are anticipating that minority turnout will drop off, but we already know that's not the case, and that's important as you look at some polls here. The electorate has been increasingly and consistently more diverse.
"Minority voting is going to reach an all-time high this year , projected as high as 28% of all voters in the '12 Election. Most new registrants over the past three months are under 30, and nearly all-four in five-are youth, women, African American or Latino. ... [T]hese are all groups that strongly support the President's re-election. Voter registration has increased most among Latinos and African Americans, and two-thirds of those who have already voted are women, youth, African Americans or Latinos. In-person, early vote is especially popular among African American voters, and early voting among African Americans has increased since 2008 in North Carolina and Virginia. In-person to early voting has only just begun in Colorado, North Carolina, Nevada and Wisconsin - has not yet begun in Florida, but Democrats are winning everywhere among in-person early votes. ...
"We continue to think it's going to be a higher percentage of minorities and young people than some are forecasting. If you look at the past, you continue to see an increase in numbers who voted. 1996, 96 million people voted, then 105, then 122 in the Bush/Kerry election, then 131 in 2008. We aren't looking at national numbers. We're going by state, and how we get to 50.1 in all these battleground states. And we continue to think that the math has changed. Florida's a good example of that. There are 250,000 more registered African American and Latino voters than there were four years ago when the President won Florida. ... In North Carolina, in the first five days of early vote, 50% more African Americans voted than in 2008. ... [T]hat shows enthusiasm, it shows organization, but I think it also says it's going to be a different total electorate that votes in 2012 than people are expecting. ...
"Early vote in Wisconsin, it's another bright spot for the campaign: 67% of all early voters are women, youth, African American and Latino, groups that favor the President strongly. ... We have the added advantage in Wisconsin: It's a same-day registration state, so we can help ourselves on the ground on Election Day as well, so we expect a higher turnout there. Look, we understand Wisconsin is a battleground state ... [T]he math is just getting harder and harder for Governor Romney in some of these states, to what he would have to get on Election Day to come back in states like Wisconsin."
-Politico Playbook (10-26-12)
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