The 2012 presidential contest revolves around one central question: Will this be a national or a state-by-state election?
If it’s a national election — one dominated by an overarching theme — Mitt Romney will win.
His theme is that President Obama has failed and it’s time for a new direction.
We can see, over the past two weeks, how this theme is starting to move voters nationwide — with polls tightening even in states like Washington and California and Massachusetts.
OK: Romney won’t come even remotely close to winning any of those states — but if things continue as they’re going, he will cut Obama’s 2008marginsof 20 to 30 points in half. In California alone, that could mean he’ll get 1 million to 2 million more votes than John McCain did. This suggests just how different this race is looking from Obama’s triumph four years ago.
Even more striking, it demonstrates that Obama has failed to harness any kind of national momentum himself.
Nobody understands how political momentum works, the way nobody understands how a curve ball works when technically a baseball’s path can’t curve. But just as a curve ball seems to curve, momentum is a very real thing as elections approach.
Momentum feeds off a national theme. People get a sense they’re participating in something larger than themselves, making a historic social-racial-generational choice (as in 2008) or a choice to alter the nation’s direction with one vote (if Romney wins on Nov. 6).
It hasn’t hit that point yet for Romney, not with 18 days, one last debate and probably some October surprises yet to come. But if his message keeps on resonating from now until Election Day, we can expect the combination of national theme and momentum to continue.
If so, he’ll end up winning most or all of the states where the race is tight now, and win not only by a comfortable popular-vote margin but by more than 300 electoral votes (he needs 270).
Obama’s failure to generate national momentum may not matter to him and his team, because his stragegy isn’t national. He is pursuing a state-by-state strategy, aiming to win those 270 votes in the Electoral College.
And you only become president by winning the Electoral College, which is apportioned by state.
Obama’s strategy now is simple: Win Ohio. Period. No Republican has ever been elected without it. If you count electoral votes and swing states, Romney’s so-called “path to 270” becomes immensely more difficult without Ohio.
As a result,Obama abhors a national theme. Thus, when he talks about the virtues of the auto bailout, he’s actually running on something that is unpopular nationally — but he’s betting that it resonates in Ohio, which has a lot of secondary auto business.
His overall campaign goal is to sow doubts about Romney’s fitness. It’s a little bit of this, a little bit of that, throw anything and everything against the wall to see what sticks.
This method of negative campaigning classically seeks to depress a rival’s potential turnout — not by winning new voters of your own, but by convincing those who might have gone with the other guy to stay home.
Thus the Obama campaign’s unprecedented torrent of negative ads in Ohio and other swing states, to the tune of something like $500 million.
Romney and the SuperPACs backing him have spent as much, if not more, in a version of trench warfare that has netted ad makers and TV stations a billion dollars or more — an almost unimaginable effort simply to neutralize the other guy.
All that money may have been injurious to the Romney campaign in a sense: For a long while, it led Romney to believe he, too, should pursue a state-by-state Electoral College strategy.
Indeed, when Romney’s campaign appeared to be floundering, it may have been because he too sought to pivot his entire candidacy around Ohio. His sober, calm convention was explicitly designed not to turn off that state’s swing voters, especially its women voters.
But as it became apparent Romney couldn’t out-Ohio the president, he found his voice as a national candidate. He stopped firing wildly in every direction at the president and found a point of focus: He’s the man with the plan; the president tried and failed.
It’s simple and coherent.
The president has no message. None. For him, the election comes down to mechanics — indeed, down to this: Grinding out a victory by denying Romney a win in Ohio is his only hope.