The contest between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama for the presidency will end with a decisive, and possibly even a landslide, victory for Romney in November. Polling data that hasn’t even come close to supporting this contention of mine is of no relevance. Outside of political junkies, the rest of the electorate doesn’t begin paying attention to election races until after Labor Day.
Furthermore, Obama has heretofore outspent Romney vis-à-vis (intensely negative) campaign ads — in spite of the fact that Romney has by far and away outraised Obama in campaign donations. Campaign finance laws preventing Romney from spending a cent of any of the monies that he has raised for the general election until after he formally becomes the Republican Party’s presidential nominee conspire to conceal this fact. However, after the GOP convention in Tampa at the end of this month, Romney’s funds will be unleashed.
In other words, Obama hasn’t really even gotten hit — yet.
These considerations aside, polling phenomenon depicting a razor sharp race or, more incredibly, an Obama lead, is irrelevant simply and solely because it contradicts a few basic facts that partisans of all stripes must concede.
The first of such facts is that Obama is no longer an unknown candidate. He now has a record — a record of which everyone is painfully aware. So, even the most naïve, even the most ignorant of voters, will not fall for the same rhetoric of “hope and change” that Obama endlessly espoused four years ago and that succeeded in mesmerizing legions of unsuspecting Americans who ecstatically consumed the notion that he was a “new” type of politician.
That Obama himself knows this accounts for why he no longer even attempts to speak along these lines.
Secondly, the president’s approval rating has plummeted since the fall of 2008. But not only have Obama’s numbers fallen further and more rapidly than that of any other president, a Pew Research Center poll from earlier this month reinforces what every poll reader knows: Obama’s favorability rating is actually below average for a presidential candidate at this time in an election season. In short, in stark contrast to 2008, Obama is not well liked.
Thirdly, it stretches credibility to the snapping point to think that everyone who voted for Obama in 2008 will vote for him this time around. Not even close.
Blacks will vote for him, certainly, but even within this demographic, his support is not likely to be as astronomically high as it was four years ago. For one, the hope shared by far too many blacks that the election of the first black president would usher in a golden age of a sort for black Americans is now exposed for the patent absurdity that it has always been. Unemployment rates are high overall, but they have skyrocketed among blacks, and black youth in particular.
More importantly, though, Obama’s endorsement of homosexual “marriage” promises to cost him some support among blacks — a likelihood that no less a figure than Louis Farrakhan foreshadowed. Not long ago, the Nation of Islam head — a close friend of Obama’s former pastor of 20-plus years, Jeremiah Wright, and one-time Obama backer — noted in disgust that our 44th president is the first occupant of the White House to sanction this practice. In addition to Farrakhan, there are also black Christian pastors who, in spite of having once endorsed Obama, have now publicly repudiated him for taking this position.
Others who voted for Obama last time around are much less likely to do so this time.
Take Roman Catholics, as a prime example. Although the media has done a splendid job of diverting the public’s attention from it, the Catholic Church has been besieged by the Obama administration. The Affordable Health Care Act — ObamaCare — is an unprecedented attack against both religious liberty and freedom of conscience. Catholic clerics around the country have alerted their congregants to this. Catholics will not be voting for Obama in anything like their numbers in 2008.
Independents constitute another group that threw its weight behind Obama in the last election. Precisely because, as with everyone else, independents now have a track record with which to gauge Obama, there is no way that he will garner nearly as much support from them in November.
Fourth, 2008 marked the end of George W. Bush’s second term. As evidenced by voters’ readiness to cashier congressional Republicans in the mid-terms of ’06 and Bush’s 30-percent approval rating two years later, the country had GOP fatigue.
Matters are otherwise now.
The economy has gone from bad to worse during the course of Obama’s first term. And it is the economy that is voters’ top priority. Even in those polls that show Obama leading Romney, the latter consistently ranks higher in voter confidence when it comes to this most crucial of issues. Small business owners and young adults who owe tens of thousands in student loan debt but who can’t find a job know about Obama’s abysmal handling of the economy better than anyone else. They also aren’t bound to be suckered by him again.
Fifth, when we consider that Republicans are more enthusiastic now than they had been in a long time, Romney promises to elicit every bit as much and significantly more support than John McCain received in ’08. From the rise of the Tea Party to the Republican tsunami of the 2010 midterm elections and the recent explosion of support for Chick-fil-A, there is no conceivable reason to deny this.
There is one final consideration that portends a sweeping Romney victory.
Congressman and former presidential contender Ron Paul has a significant and devoted following of young voters. Their passion is second to none. Doubtless, some of them will refuse to vote for either Romney or Obama. But there is reason to suspect that some of them will. Paul and Romney never showed any signs of having a strained relationship, and even though Paul hasn’t as of yet endorsed the latter, neither has he endorsed anyone else, as he did in 2008. Nor do I think it is likely that he will.
Ron’s son Rand, Kentucky senator and a rising star in the Tea Party, has endorsed Romney. Ron is retiring. Rand is not, and the father doesn’t want to make unnecessary waves for the son. Moreover, Rand has been allotted a speaking platform at the GOP Convention — a turn of events that can only help Romney among young Paul supporters.
Barring any unexpected revelations to the effect that Romney is a killer or a closet enslaver (Obama’s and Joe Biden’s attempts to convince us of this have thus far failed), it looks as if it’s going be a clean Romney victory in November.
