rickyp wrote:oh my goodness Steve!!!!
Today...thats right today. january 11
Rasmussen has the head to head
Obama 44 Mitt 41


http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... l_matchups

Whats wrong with Rasmussens methodology now!!!

Sassenach wrote:This argument about polling methodologies has now been taking place for about a fortnight and only seems to have been getting more tedious with every repetition. I wouldn't mind so much but it seems now to be spreading to multiple threads. Is there any chance you guys could give it a rest for a bit ? we do have almost a year to go before the election....

Sassenach wrote:This argument about polling methodologies has now been taking place for about a fortnight and only seems to have been getting more tedious with every repetition. I wouldn't mind so much but it seems now to be spreading to multiple threads. Is there any chance you guys could give it a rest for a bit ? we do have almost a year to go before the election....

Ray Jay wrote:I don't see how Huntsman stays in ... he's campaigned forever in NH which has demographics just right for him, and allows independents to vote in the primary. if he can only get 1 out of 6 voters in NH, I don't see the point of him continuing. Russ?

the next he is a prophet of things to come.

Well, supposedly Huntsman has a very strong campaign crew in South Carolina, basically most of McCain's 2008 team, so I think he is hoping for a better then expected showing to get him through to Florida

Archduke Russell John wrote:At least that is what I have read. I don't think it will work. I think he needed a 2nd place finish in NH to get any kind of money interest in his campaign. I don't think a 3rd place, even though it was a decent showing, will do it for him.

Archduke Russell John wrote:Well, supposedly Huntsman has a very strong campaign crew in South Carolina, basically most of McCain's 2008 team, so I think he is hoping for a better then expected showing to get him through to Florida. From what I have read he is expecting the Northeastern retirees that have moved to Florida to vote from him. If he doesn't do well in Florida, he will drop out.

At least that is what I have read. I don't think it will work. I think he needed a 2nd place finish in NH to get any kind of money interest in his campaign. I don't think a 3rd place, even though it was a decent showing, will do it for him.

danivon wrote:What he has done, however, is set out his stall. If Obama wins in November, Hunstman would be in a position to make a shot for the 16 race.

rickyp wrote:The Bain bashing seems to have taken effect in SC already if the recent newspaper poll released today is right.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/

Romney is down to 23%. (Huntsman up to 7)

Obama has some very daunting problems to contend with, of course. His record of accomplishments, amassed mostly in his first two years in office, is extremely unpopular and so could not be the centerpiece of a reelection campaign. He has presided over the largest deficits in American history and nearly doubled the national debt. He pushed through a large stimulus bill in 2009 that is taken to have been a failure (in no small part because the administration defined metrics for success, like keeping unemployment from rising above 8%, that have plainly not been met) and a health-care reform in 2010 that started out quite unpopular and has gotten only more so with time. Meanwhile the economy remains weak, unemployment remains high, and 80 percent of voters are dissatisfied with the direction of the country.

This has left the president in an exceptionally challenging political position in a re-election year. At the beginning of November of 2010, on the day Republicans took 63 House seats and 5 senate seats from the Democrats, Obama’s job approval in Gallup’s daily tracking poll was 44 percent; today it is 43 percent. Party identification in November 2010, according to Gallup, was 31 percent Democrat, 26 percent Republican, and 41 percent independent; in December 2011 it was 27 percent Democrat, 30 percent Republican, and 42 percent independent. Republicans held a 5 point lead in Rasmussen’s generic congressional ballot that November, and today they have a 6 point lead.

All this suggests there is no self-evident path to reelection for the president. He can hope for significant improvements in the economy to change his fortunes (although the unemployment rate is a good bit lower today than in November 2010 and that doesn’t seem to have done the trick), but he can’t run on his record or rely on some cushion of public confidence and satisfaction. He needs a positive strategy to improve his circumstances. But the campaign strategy his team appears to be putting into place would seem to be very poorly suited to doing so.

Based on what the president and his advisers have said and done in recent weeks, that strategy appears to consist of creating populist confrontations with Congress and then complaining that Washington is broken because Republicans won’t let the president have his way. That’s a strategy that tells the public that the current situation in Washington is untenable and change is needed. Is that not an odd way for a Democratic incumbent president (whose party also controls the Senate) to run against a Republican outsider? It first of all exacerbates the public’s mistrust of government, which tends to reinforce Republican policy proposals (since those generally aim to take power away from government) but to undermine Democratic ones (which generally aim to give more power to government). It also implies that President Obama is having trouble doing his job, which can’t be a great re-election theme. It says that the problem we have is the result of a conflict between the president and Congress in a year when the Republican party, but not the Democratic party, will be led by someone who is neither the president nor in Congress and so is presumably not part of that problem. And it argues (understandably) that things could only get better if the White House and Congress were both held by Democrats—but the last time that happened was when we ended up with those unpopular achievements of Obama’s first two years. Is he proposing to do more of that?

Indeed, the question of just what he is proposing to do raises another peculiar problem with this emerging strategy. The Obama team’s approach might make sense if the substance of their policy proposals were enormously popular, so that telling the public that these could be enacted if only Obama is given a few more years to push them might help his case. But what are those proposals? A payroll-tax holiday? Higher taxes on the wealthy? Is there anything else? Or to put it another way, why does the president want to be re-elected? To stop Mitt Romney? To implement Obamacare? What does he want to do with a second term? More of the same?

You have to assume that the Obama team understands how immensely unappealing the promise of four more years of the politics of the past three years would be to the public. Maybe what they have put in place so far is a predicate for some policy proposals—perhaps a comprehensive tax reform, or some entitlement reforms that might scramble the ideological mix a bit. But that would seem to be in tension with the goal of creating conflicts with congress over economically populist ideas, and in tension with the president’s recent actions, appointments, proposals, and tone. It certainly doesn’t seem like he’s still planning fundamentally to pose as a centrist who wants to work with Republicans.