Obama's Endgame and Mitt Romney's Desperate Play

 by Deaniac83/The People's View

In the midst of total freakout in whiner-land and glee from conservatives who smelled blood in early October, the president's campaign kept on keepin' on. They kept calling voters, knocking on doors, getting the early vote out. This weekend, the Obama campaign reported a massive and unprecedented 125 million voter contacts, compared to a pittance of 50 million by Romney. All the final polls released now show the president with a significant lead in the battleground states, and while the images of long early voting lines and troubles are more than embarrassing for the world's greatest democracy, they upend the imaginary "enthusiasm-gap" that pundits think favor Romney.


The Romney campaign knows that it's President Obama who's expanding the map and has a very good chance of running the table on the swing states. He knows that as the president's campaign gets out unlikely, sporadic voters out in the swing states and methodically builds a lead going into election day, his paths to 270 are being closed fast. How fast?

 For Romney, just cutting the early-vote/absentee margin in key states might not be enough. Take Ohio, again – as both candidates would love to do. As the percentages now stand, Romney would have to win Election Day voting in Ohio by 10 percentage points to win the state outright,according to Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign manager for Obama.

Yep, Ohio is getting bluer by the day, and Mitt Romney knows it. To consider another example, in Iowa, President Obama is winning the early vote by a whopping 22 points.

Add to the president's massive ground operations and Mitt Romney's massive auto-lie fails, the pollsters' failure - previously pointed out here on TPV - to properly account for the energized and expanded Latino vote. Just as we are getting closer to the election, the mainstream is doing a little bit of CYA.

 It turns out it’s hard for pollsters to capture the opinions of America’s fastest growing minority group. So hard, according to one researcher in the field, that many polling outfits have misfired in their attempts to survey Latino voters in this year’s election.

Matt Barreto, founding principal at the research firm Latino Decisions and professor at the University of Washington, said on Thursday that his work has shown pollsters are often sloppy when they field a Latino sample.

Ya think?

Those of you who are regular readers of TPV know that I never believed in a big bounce for Romney's numbers after the first debate. Whatever wind the media's acquiescence to Mr. Romney's lying put in his sail was subsequently taken out by next three debates (one VP, two presidential), the president's incredible ground game, and the forward momentum of the Obama recovery as well as President Obama's calm, cool and collected ways of dealing with every crisis he has confronted - whether the economic crisis when he took office, the decision to swiftly take out bin Laden, or managing the response to a natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy.


Mitt Romney's campaign is scared, and their candidate is desperate. They know that they're losing Ohio. They know Nevada is gone. They know Obama is making a comeback in Virginia. They know that their desperate ad lying about Jeep's production moving to China (which isn't happening) isn't working. They know Mitt Romney's wild swings from a severe conservative to a me-too moderate back to an angry white man isn't working. They have been reduced to being called out by iconic American auto makers, holding campaign rallies and calling them "storm relief events," and trying to run after fool's gold in Pennsylvania.

Conservatives are already preparing for Paul Ryan's next steps "in case" (read: when) the Romney-Ryan ticket loses the election, including whether a Palin-style quit might be in the works from Congress.

 Some of Ryan's biggest boosters are considering whether it wouldn't be better for Ryan to resign from the House. He could write a book — "saving America" is a theme often bandied about — or teach at a university.

As for Ryan himself? He's busy is making a last minute plea to theocrats and scaring them about how Obama might not be a Christian.


I have said before that Mitt Romney has a tell. A tell that tells you he knows he's losing. He runs around saying he's winning big. That's the tell. And right now, that is what he's doing. Running around telling everyone who will listen - which isn't that many people - that he's going to have a blowout tomorrow. And then, in Colbertesque fashion, he's going to build a better tomorrow, tomorrow.

But here is how things stand right now: the wind is on the president's back, but we gotta have his back until all the polls close everywhere. We gotta have faith, we gotta have his back, and we gotta pull this country through. We can do this. We will do this. This is it. Let's roll!