The Big Ten polling consortium has some shock-and-awe numbers this morning favoring Obama in the midwest, particularly in states like Ohio (+12), Michigan (+22), Minnesota (+19), Wisconsin (+13) and Indiana (+10). (And no, the Indiana number is not a typo!) If these numbers are real and not outliers, they foreshadow a landslide for Obama. As usual, Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com gives the best explanation of how we should view them.
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The Phony War: Obama and Romney Are Debating Character, Not Policy
More than five months from Election Day, the back-and-forth about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain already feels played out. Unfortunately, there’s good reason to expect the campaign continues in this vein indefinitely. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney are terribly interested in dwelling on policy platforms. Romney’s plan to slash spending and keep taxes low on the wealthy isn’t especially popular, at least not at any level of detail beyond a blithe promise to shrink the deficit. Meanwhile, Obama’s signature first-term achievements, like health care, the stimulus and Wall Street reform, are all unpopular or tricky to sell. (The Dodd-Frank bill is the most popular of these, but hyping it means offending wealthy donors.) So what we’re getting instead is a superficial duel about character–and, worse, one that’s based on the largely false premise that the better man can better “manage” the economy back to health.
