At this point in the race, President Obama should be holding a comfortable lead in the national polls over Governor Romney. Yet as you know, the race remains neck-and-neck nationally, and Romney continues to raise more money than the president. One gets the feeling that the Democrats and Team Obama are now running scared.
It seems that in every general election cycle there is always some drama surrounding the polls and polling data. Last week we had just such a drama regarding a trio of CBS/NYTimes polls that oversampled Democrats by a whopping +9 margin in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Due to the blatant oversampling, all three polls showed Obama with a wide lead.
Normally, polls should have no more than a +3 political skew either direction to be considered valid. With a +9 skew, these latest state polls should have been considered invalid and ignored. Instead the media widely published the results that heavily favored the president (surprise, surprise), even though these polls are statistical outliers that hold no real value. And yes, I would feel the same way if the polls had similar internal skews toward Governor Romney.
These three flawed polls have widened the president’s average national lead to 3.3% (RealClearPolitics average of all national polls this morning). Not a huge number, all things considered, but it is the largest lead Obama has held on average in quite a while. But will it hold? As always, the “gold standard” of polling is Gallup. The Gallup seven-day rolling average has the national poll tied once again as of today: Obama 46% vs. Romney 46%.
The party conventions are fast approaching, and each candidate will likely get a “bump” in the polls out of their respective convention. However, I expect the post-convention polls to remain tight nationally. There is not much in the way of new state-by-state poll numbers this week save for Indiana where Romney holds a commanding lead.
Now let’s take a look at the so-called “Enthusiasm Gap.” A recent poll from Gallup measured the enthusiasm of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents versus Democrats and Democrat-leaning Independents. The result was a huge +13 point gap (52 vs. 39) in favor of the GOP.
What does this tell us? That the Republican base is fired up and the Democratic base is simply ho-hum. Part of the reason for the wide enthusiasm gap is that Democrats know it is very difficult for anyone to defeat an incumbent president. Of course, the other side of that argument is that the Democrat base is disenchanted and may not turn out in the same overwhelming numbers they did in 2008. We will see.
I want to close with this interesting item. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) is actively organizing the unemployed into a union. Yes, you read that right – the unemployed are forming their own union, the Union of the Unemployed (better known as “U-Cubed”).
Through the use of the Internet and social media outlets, this 100,000-strong organization is pressuring their government representatives in Washington for the creation and passage of a new Works Progress Administration or WPA 2.0.
You will remember the original WPA that was created by President Roosevelt in 1935 during the Great Depression, which employed millions of workers for public works projects. The original WPA spent a reported $13.4 billion of taxpayer money before it ended in 1943. That was big money back then! Some say it was the precursor to our massively bloated government today.
I am sorry folks, but this effort to gin-up WPA 2.0 seems to me to be a shameful attempt by one of the biggest Democrat constituents, organized labor, to manufacture votes for Obama, whose policies have done little or nothing to create jobs (I would argue they have reduced jobs). What an irony that the unemployed would be lured into a new union that would pressure them to re-elect Obama, in the hope that he will enact WPA 2.0 – the ultimate “make-work scheme” – next year! How very sad.
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