Are We Heading toward a Split Decision?
The closer we get to election day-and it is only 12 days away now-the more likely it becomes that the voters render a split decision with Mitt Romney winning the popular vote and Barack Obama winning the electoral college. A new WaPo/ABC national poll of likely voters puts Romney ahead 50 percent to 47 percent. This is the first time Romney has hit 50 percent in this poll. Both sides are enthusiastic, with 95 percent of the Obama supporters and 93 percent of the Romney supporters being somewhat or very enthusiastic. Noteworthy is that 52 percent of the respondents think Obama will win vs. 40 percent who think Romney will win.
Yesterday's Gallup tracking poll also shows Romney ahead 50 percent to 47 percent, but this represents a 4-point gain for Obama in this poll in a week. Romney led by 7 points in Gallup's tracking poll a week ago. While it is difficult to compare results from different pollsters due to different methodologies, Gallup's results suggest that Romney's momentum has stopped and maybe been reversed.
National polls aside, Obama maintains a small but steady lead in the electoral college. In the past two weeks in Ohio, nine polls have had Obama ahead and only one had Romney ahead. Three polls were tied. As we and everybody else has said a hundred times, without Ohio, it is nearly impossible for Romney to win, even if he gets every last vote in the Deep South and a large popular-vote margin. In Nevada, Obama has had leads of at least 2 points in all five polls in the past two weeks. Another key state is Virginia. There in the last two weeks Obama led in five polls and trailed in four. So a plausible outcome is that Romney wins the popular vote but Obama wins the states the Democrats have won the past five elections, plus Ohio, New Mexico, and Nevada, for a total of 271 electoral votes. Virginia would be icing on the cake. With such a narrow victory, Obama would have no mandate at all and we would have four more years of gridlock. Of course, an equally narrow Romney victory coupled with Democratic control of the Senate (thanks to the politics of rape), would yield a similar result.
