The momentum belongs to Romney

Larry Sabato is a distinguished political scientist at the University of Virginia. I have quoted his online newsletter, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, before. It provides reliable, non-partisan and generally interesting commentary and accurate electoral predictions. Last week’s edition, like another reliable source, Real Clear Politics, confirmed what just about everyone agrees on: the contest between President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney is too close to call, both in terms of the popular vote and in how it translates into the votes of the Electoral College. Several commentators have raised the possibility of an Electoral College tie, which would turn the final decision over to the new House of Representatives in January. That may be unlikely, but so was the decision in the Bush-gore election, which came down to 537 voters in Florida. Sabato and other forecasters often base their predictions on trends. As one of my friends who pays close attention to market movements said, “the trend is your friend.” If this also applies to American elections, Romney has a bigger friend in the trend than Obama. There are two measures that are relevant here. The first is the shift in voter intentions, both for likely voters and for all eligible voters. The average of all national horse-race polls produced by Real Clear Politics puts Romney ahead by less than one per cent, but given that a month ago, Obama was ahead by more than four points, the trend is clearly in Romney’s direction. A second measure, in some ways more interesting, is their respective favourability ratings. They are both tied at around 49 per cent, but prior to the first debate, Obama was ahead by nearly seven points. When you look at net favourability, which measures the difference between the number who view the candidate favourably, minus the number who view him unfavourably, Romney is ahead by two points. A major reason for the change seems to be Romney’s performance in the debates, which raises the question: what were the debates about? For two reasons, they were not about policy. First, nobody can state a coherent policy in a few seconds. Second, unexpected future events determine policy, not existing party platforms. No party had a policy position regarding a terrorist attack prior to Sept. 11, 2001; no party had a policy position regarding the great recession prior to its appearance. Conventional political science wisdom is that “debates are for losers.” As Peter Schrott and David Lanoue said, “it’s less important to hit a home run than to avoid striking out.” Because Romney didn’t strike out, he won — not perhaps according to the standards of a debating society, but because he improved his chances of winning the election. Specifically, he demolished the image crafted by the Obama team over the summer and came across as a credible alternative: moderate, rational and focused. The debates gave the audience a chance to judge the personality, character and soul of the debaters. They could see for themselves the mean-spiritedness or good will of one or the other (or both) men. When participants made unfair comments to one another, it was a test not of the truth of an accusation, but of how well a leader could respond to an unreasonable and unfair situation. That is what a test of character is supposed to do. The results are pretty clear. Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times that an “aura of defeat” has overtaken the Obama team. Losing campaigns, he said, have a certain desperate feel to them: they go strongly negative, appeal almost entirely to their core supporters and try to turn “minor slipups into massive electionturning scandals.” Everyone knows the real issues are the economy and jobs, not funding for PBS, Big Bird and Romnesia.

On the other side, the Romney team is confident. Their guy is drawing large crowds, as big as Obama did in 2008, and they are obviously having a lot more fun than the Democrats.

The policy realities of a fragile economic recovery and the difficulties of formulating a coherent foreign policy are still important determinants of the election outcome. But so too was the unfiltered glimpse of Mitt Romney’s soul that the debates provided.