Here\u2019s a shocker.\u00a0 Judging by this morning\u2019s top line polling data, almost nothing in the presidential race has changed since mid-January.<\/p>\n
Think of it.<\/p>\n
The first three-day Rasmussen head-to-head tracking poll in 2012 (taken January 19-21) found 46 percent of voters supporting President Obama to 43 percent supporting Governor Romney, a three-point spread.<\/p>\n
In Rasmussen\u2019s most recent May 18-20 poll, 47 percent favored the president, 44 percent the governor, also a three-point spread \u2013 zero change in four months.<\/p>\n
I am not saying that Mr. Obama has been ahead throughout.\u00a0 Since March 1st<\/sup>, the race\u2019s lead position has switched sixteen times.\u00a0 Today the president is ahead.\u00a0 Last week Mr. Romney was.\u00a0 But almost all this movement has been within polling\u2019s margin of error.<\/p>\n But even if nothing has changed, signs are that everything is in the process of changing.<\/p>\n It is classic campaign strategy to lock up your base early.\u00a0 That\u2019s what the White House has been up to for several months now.\u00a0 Take the \u201cwar on women,\u201d the Obama campaign\u2019s charge that Republicans don\u2019t care about the concerns of female voters.\u00a0 It is not often that a presidential campaign theme backfires.\u00a0 For the most part, messaging at this level is not left to chance.\u00a0 Nothing gets said that hasn\u2019t been tested thirty different ways.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s a surprise that polls are suggesting that the \u201cwar on women\u201d theme may have weakened the Democrat\u2019s hold on the women\u2019s vote.\u00a0 According to this morning\u2019s Gallup tracking poll, the president is now trailing among non-minority women overall, receiving support from 42 percent as against 50 percent for Governor Romney.<\/p>\n A clue as to why appeared on Sunday in, of all places, in The New York Times<\/em>.\u00a0 In an op-ed (see http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/d72fslw)<\/a>, Campbell Brown, former news anchor for CNN and NBC (and wife, she noted, of a Romney advisor), wrote with dismay of the president\u2019s \u201cpaternalistic tone\u201d in talking to women.\u00a0 The White House\u2019s harping on contraceptives and abortion \u2013 the anchor of the \u201cwar on women\u201d theme — has gone too far, Brown said.\u00a0 When she asked women she knew, she reported, \u201cif contraception or abortion might be a major factor in their decision about this election,\u201d all laughed.<\/p>\n Campbell concluded, \u201cMost women don\u2019t want to be patted on the head and treated as wards of the state.\u00a0 They simply want to be given a chance to succeed based on their talents and skills.\u201d<\/p>\n The administration\u2019s \u201cwar on the middle class\u201d theme \u2013 as in, the Republicans are waging a \u201cwar on the middle class\u201d \u2013 isn\u2019t faring much better.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve all seen the Obama campaign using Mr. Romney\u2019s tenure at Bain Capital to brand the former governor king of the one percent, meaning of the very wealthy against whom the Occupy Wall Street crowd railed.<\/p>\n It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but identifying himself with Occupy Wall Street was among the president\u2019s least astute moves of the year.\u00a0 With their interminable squatting in public parks and sanctimonious agenda of entitlement, the occupiers have disgusted more and more Americans as the year has progressed.\u00a0 By rioting at the NATO summit in Chicago this week, they seem determined to turn themselves into another kind of one percent, uniting 99 percent of the country in revulsion against them and their ways.<\/p>\n Over the weekend, the administration\u2019s effort to turn the spotlight on Romney\u2019s business career backfired badly in another way, as Newark, New Jersey\u2019s widely admired mayor and Obama spokesman Cory Booker labeled the attacks on Bain Capital and the private equity industry \u201cnauseating.\u201d\u00a0 Following an apparent White House tongue lashing, Booker reversed himself only to have another popular African-American Democrat, former Congressman Harold Ford, Jr., announce he agreed with \u201cthe substance\u201d of Booker\u2019s initial remarks, adding he \u201cwould not have backed down.\u201d<\/p>\n But over the next few months, the recent development that may most minimize the force of the White House\u2019s \u201cwar on the middle class\u201d theme has been the publication of a groundbreaking academic study.<\/p>\n The authors are a team of Cornell and Indiana university economists who have spent years digging into individual and household income statistics.\u00a0 They have found that the administration\u2019s portrait of stagnation for the middle versus soaring splendor for the rich rests on incomplete income data.\u00a0 It fails to account for family and household arrangements, non-cash benefits and income transfers and the impact of ever changing tax law.\u00a0 Rather than stagnating, they discovered, the income of median American households rose a healthy 36.7 percent between 1979 and 2007.\u00a0 Inequality of incomes, they reported, \u201chasn\u2019t increased very much since 1993.\u201d (see http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/bps9qsn<\/a>)<\/p>\n Here is a truth of America politics: It is almost impossible for a candidacy to survive the collapse of the factual and moral case on which it rests.<\/p>\n So nothing has changed since January, except, perhaps, everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here\u2019s a shocker.\u00a0 Judging by this morning\u2019s top line polling data, almost nothing in the presidential race has changed since mid-January. Think of it. The first three-day Rasmussen head-to-head tracking poll in 2012 (taken January 19-21) found 46 percent of voters supporting President Obama to 43 percent supporting Governor Romney, a three-point spread. In Rasmussen\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-1230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politicalcommentary-campaign-2012","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1230"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1392,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230\/revisions\/1392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}