President Mitt Romney – Why?

Mitt Romney will easily win the Presidency of the USA.
 Why ?

For Australians unfamiliar with the USA voting system the evidence I believe is overwhelming and clear.

I recently was honoured to be present at a private briefing on the state of the Republican campaign in the USA by the RNC’s leading research and polling experts. The details are confidential but the overall realities of changes in the political landscape for President Obama are clear.

A few salient facts :

The American presidential election model is based on a system requiring a majority of electoral college votes which are distributed by winning each state.

Barack Obama won an overwhelming majority of these states and votes in 2008. 365 Obama – 173 McCain.

Seemingly everything went his way.

This time however, the voters as evidenced by the polls (when you look past the often misleading headline number), and changes in the real world of the American political and voting system will work massively against Obama’s re-election.

For the purposes of this analysis “issues” will not be looked at as they are very subjective … but rather actual changes in the political landscape / voting system etc. that will almost certainly dramatically change the result.

Firstly … there has been a change to the number of votes that will decide the presidency in each state.  Every 10 years following the USA census, the electoral college votes available to each of the 50 US states is changed up or down to account for population changes between the states.  This time round major Obama strongholds such as California and New York have lost influence … while likely Romney strongholds such as Texas, Utah and Sth Carolina have gained them.

While each individual change may only be a vote or a few votes (Texas gained 4) in the larger scheme of things … it is the overall cumulative change that helps Romney  (several states he is likely to switch away from President Obama for example will only accentuate this effect, the baseline from last election is a misleading one.)

Secondly … polling, the USA voting system is voluntary so that there are 2 hurdles a candidate must overcome.

1) To get someone to actually get out and vote, &

2) To get them to vote for them.

In the USA polling uses models from previous elections when determining the likely distribution of voters for each election.

How do they make sure they are not over sampling one party or the other? Answer, use the distribution patterns from the last similar election as a guide.

The problem here is that in 2008 there was a huge number of one off voters caught up in the hope and change 1st black president “historic” election. There is significant evidence that this effect has diminished greatly.

Counting on this to happen again will tend to skew the results of polls enormously towards Obama when the reality as any common sense analysis would confirm is certain to be different.

But without any historic real world alternative model to work from, understandably 2008 is used despite almost fatal flaws within it.

Those pollsters who attempt to measure the “voting intensity gap” … between committed / devoted voters for Obama and Romney show huge double digit differences in the number of highly motivated voters in favour of Romney, i.e. those most likely to actually vote in normal circumstances.  If this is no longer a hope and change Obama love fest as in 2008, this intensity gap will have a significant effect on the actual voting results (helping Romney).

Many of the polls themselves have changed their assumptions and sampling to help erroneous projections of support for Obama.

Following criticism by the Obama team that the results of the Gallup polls were starting to turn against Obama after his disastrous debate performance … Gallup significantly changed it’s methodology (to favour Obama) in the last month of the election.  This is unprecedented and highly suspicious.

Two other major changes have occurred since 2008 that will affect the mechanics of the result towards Romney.

Campaign finance law changes – coming in after 2008 … these obviously have had a big change on the process … I am yet to hear any comments anywhere that suggest that this process (the emergence of so called Super PACs) has helped the Democrats.

However, the most significant and important factor that will change the dynamic of this election is the existence and grass roots involvement of the Tea Party.

Started in 2009 (and therefore unable to effect the 2008 elections)…the effect of the Tea Party and it’s grass roots operation can be gauged by the results of the most recent 2010 Congressional elections. The result was the largest change in a mid term election towards the Republicans since 1938. Despite the countervailing effect of institutional Democratic strongholds such as Chicago, New York, Las Vegas and Maddison (where voting irregularities are rumoured to have been influenced by the Democrat party machine for many years) the effect outside these dens of Democrat votes was truly historic….

In a presidential election even widespread voter fraud in some cities can be overcome by tens of millions of Tea Party activists across the nation. Obviously based on the actual results in 2010 (the most recent and therefore most applicable nationwide voting) the effect of the Tea Party in get out the vote efforts is likely to be far greater than 2008 when of course they did not exist.

I suggest that issues and economic problems for the Obama presidency will only highlight the basic political landscape issues working for Gov. Romney and against President Obama this election.

I suggest it will not even be close!

 2 POSSIBLE ..BEST CASE  AND LIKELY  CASE   SCENARIOS.

FINAL CALCULATION OF THE RESULT BEST CASE 

ROMNEY/RYAN  337-    OBAMA /BIDEN  201

FINAL CALCULATION OF THE RESULT LIKELY CASE

ROMNEY/RYAN  295 – OBAMA /BIDEN  243

David Goodridge.