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Alan Fisher
Ahead of the first presidential debate in Denver, I told Al Jazeera’s global audience that, for Mitt Romney, the three Ms were very important: message, momentum and money. My argument was that Mitt would try desperately hard to get his message across to the watching millions, hope that this would create some momentum for his stuttering campaign, and attract the donors he needed to finance the last big push to election day.
No-one outside of the Romney campaign expected such a turnaround from that first meeting. No-one expected President Barack Obama to be so bad or for Mitt Romney to energise the Republican base quite so dramatically.
The day after the debate I went to a Romney/Ryan rally in Fishersville, Virginia. The traffic to the event tailed back for kilometre after kilometre, hundreds more people turned out than were expected. Suddenly people were positive about their candidate. Romney was no longer the anti-Obama vote. People actually wanted to support him.
From that first debate the face of the race changed. Romney started to pull back the huge gap he had in the national polls, and in some cases, even pushed ahead. The story changed from the problems his campaign had through September to a momentum story (‘Mittmentum’ one newspaper called it in a terribly tortuous use of language). And so with less than a week to election day, the Romney campaign is hammering momentum, the ‘big mo’, with a continuing surge in the polls. Some Democrats are worried and wavering, thinking that an election they considered to be in the bag just six weeks ago might actually be lost.
However, the problem for the Republicans is that this election is more likely to be decided by maths than momentum. Most of the polls are national but American elections are not decided on the popular vote, but on the electoral college and the individual state races. As I’ve written before, Barack Obama simply has more ways to the coveted figure of 270 electoral college votes than his Republican rival.
No Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio. In 14 of the last 16 polls, Obama has been ahead and tied in the other two. A top Republican political operative in Nevada said last week that Romney is likely to lose the state. In Iowa, another key swing state, early voting has attracted more female and young voters breaking, according to some estimates, 2-1 in favour of Obama. A win in those three states plus the traditional Democratic strongholds and Obama’s your president. If that wasn’t enough, two recent polls in the fiercely fought state of Virginia show Obama slightly ahead.
The Romney campaign says that its rivals are obsessed with numbers and are ignoring the realities of a surging Republican vote in Michigan and huge inroads being made in safe Democrat areas, such as Pennsylvania. It has adopted the theme it used so much during the primary process – that Mitt Romney’s success is inevitable. Given the national polls, they believe it is a compelling argument.
Alan Fisher’s latest despatch:
Wednesday
A year ago this week I was in Ohio. I was following round the Republican candidates seeking the presidential nomination, taking the temperature of the race. And then I headed off to the Ronald Reagan dinner – ‘a gathering of Iowa’s most influential Republican office holders and activists’ – to get an idea of who they may favour in the first of the primary contests which, at that point, were less than two months away.
For the last 12 months, I have followed every move in the race for the White House. I have read thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, dozens of books, watched countless TV shows and interviews and innumerable clips on You Tube. I’ve been to all the key Republican primary contests, attended the Republican National Convention in Tampa and I’ve been to and reported from the three presidential and one vice-presidential debate.
Even when I try to switch off and watch some TV, my viewing is disturbed by the barrage of campaign ads. It’s fodder for the late-night talk shows, a gift for comedians. I even dream about the election. And while part of me will be glad when it’s finally over, I also know that I will miss it terribly. I accept that I follow the campaigns so closely because it’s my job. But even it if wasn’t, I’d still be very interested, even though as an ‘outsider’ I have no vote.
Now, as I write, there are just six days to go to what both sides have predictably called ‘perhaps the most important election in US history’. And I’m told that the race will be decided by the undecided. Apparently, there are people who, despite the saturation coverage of the election and the candidates, have yet to make up their mind how to vote. It seems incredible to journalists like me, political junkies and even those on the campaigns, that there are citizens who haven’t reached a decision on who would better handle the major challenges facing the US, who would make a better commander in chief, who deserves to win the White House.
Both sides will spend the next six days trying to convince those undecideds to move to them. They’ll be calling, knocking on doors, even accosting people on the street to get them to back their candidate. And they will spend lots of money.
One pollster says that he’s not sure if people are truly undecided or are just reluctant to give their honest answer. And he believes that those who are undecided now probably won’t vote in 6 November. Part of what he says may be true. I know one woman who refuses to tell political canvassers who she’ll vote for, even though she made up her mind a long time ago: ‘Voting is a personal thing, I don’t feel the need to share with strangers who call’.
Some newspaper articles and commentators have called the undecided ‘stupid’ or ‘ignorant’ and even ‘boneheads’. That’s clearly unfair to people who realise the importance of their vote and the implications of their decision. Remember the election in 2000 was decided by a little more than 500 votes.
It’s perhaps a sign of frustration that the candidates aren’t what they want; a feeling they won’t deliver what they promise and will simply resort to partisan politics as soon as they are elected. It’s been a long campaign – the undecideds can take a little more time.
Alan Fisher is an Al Jazeera correspondent
