Politico Calls The Election For Barack Obama

President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede.

Naturally, Romney’s top advisors would rush to the Politico to tell them this.

The Romney campaign, while pleasantly surprised by Obama’s lackluster prime-time performance, said the post-convention bounce they hoped for fell well short of expectations and privately lament that state-by-state polling numbers — most glaringly in Ohio — are working in the president’s favor.
“Their map has many more routes to victory,” said a top Republican official. Two officials intimately involved in the GOP campaign said Ohio leans clearly in Obama’s favor now, with a high single-digit edge, based on their internal tracking numbers of conservative groups. Romney can still win the presidency if he loses Ohio, but it’s extremely difficult.

Gosh, those anonymous top Romney aides and top Republican officials are handy. They always seem to say just what the news media and the rest of the Obama campaign wants said.

The Obama and Romney campaigns anticipate little movement in national polls before the first debate on Oct. 3, which both see as the most important day of this campaign…

The Obama campaign wants to make the debates ‘the new end all and be all.’ Since they know they not only will control the questions, they will also control the spin on how well the candidates did.

They also see eye to eye on their belief that the election will come down to whether Romney can persuade voters he understands the problems of ordinary people and that his solutions are at least marginally better for turning things around economically…

Yes, it all comes down to whether Romney can trick people into thinking he understands the problems of ordinary people.

A Democratic official said the other big worry for the Obama campaign is that when you dig into the small slice of undecided voters (probably only 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate, according to the campaigns), the demographics are not favorable to Obama: mostly white, many with some college education, economically stressed, largely middle-aged…

So why does the headline of this piece say "Advantage Obama"?

Despite that, Obama officials have maintained for several weeks that there are too few undecided voters for Romney to get the bounce he needs from the debates…

So everyone has already made up their minds and the election is over. Then why is Obama still campaigning? Why is he still begging for money?

For the record, as we have often pointed out, Presidential poll has been notoriously unreliable when we are this far out. In fact, it is unreliable even when election day is close.

If you look at Gallup’s polling for past elections, you will find that after the Democrat convention ended in July 1988, Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by seventeen points. And that Jimmy Carter led Ronald Reagan by four points after the Democrat convention in September 1980.

As you may recall, things did not quite turn out that way for either of those elections. But the news media probably declared both of those races ‘over’ at the time.