They both go with “Veterans Give Romney Big Lead Over Obama.” Well… yes. This is not particularly surprising. Mitt Romney is what we call “the Re-pub-li-can nom-in-ee.” Barack Obama is “a lib-er-al Dem-o-crat.” That military veterans default to preferring the former over the latter is a ‘revelation’ roughly equivalent about the one about water tending to flow downhill. Admittedly, 28 points is a fairly large deal, but this is a difference in degree, not in kind.
No, what they should have used for the title was “Romney & Obama tied in April, May.”
Obama and Romney are tied overall at 46% apiece among all registered voters in this sample. Men give Romney an eight-point edge, while women opt for Obama over Romney by seven points.
[snip]
Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking April 11-May 24, 2012, with a random sample of 43,352 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
Note that the two are not being reported as being tied among adults, merely that the original sample was of adults (they obviously filtered out the non-registered voters via arcane poll analysis procedures). If Romney was tied with Obama among adult voters at this point then people would be too busy reading stories of mass suicides among Democratic analysts and operatives to notice polls like this anyway. Also note that this is stretched out over two months, which suggests that Team Obama’s pretty much swung and missed for a while here, huh?
Conclusions? Well, aside from the obvious one: we’re still waiting to see that well-oiled re-election campaign juggernaut that the Democrats keep referring to.
…Or was that it? – Because if so, we may need to do some recalibration of standards, here.
Moe Lane
[Not exactly an update: Ed Morrissey noticed the same thing that I did. Guess I should have published this before I took my eldest to the pool, huh? …Well, actually, no: I shouldn’t have.]
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. Of course, if that had happened to Obama, he would have said “Uh, I think that means, that, uh, we need to spend more, raise taxes, and, uh, cut defense.”
Can’t really blame the Obama campaign, even though those of us paying attention know how weak they have been. They simply don’t have a lot to work with at this point. If the economy came screaming back this Spring, Obama would be way ahead in the pools despite any incompetence on the part of his campaign. Heck, if the economy came screaming back this Spring, I’d have to wonder whether the American economy was simply stronger than a bloated government’s ability to crush it. The current situation is less surprising than any of that…
If the economy came screaming back this Spring …
And when it doesn’t, by July and August the Obama campaign’s line will be that the eeeevil Rethuglikans are deliberately, treasonously sabotaging the economy to make President Obama look bad, by doing things like … uh, not allowing Congress to pass a budget or something …
At some point we all realize that elections in the end get decided by how things are going at the time of the voting. As weak a campaign as McCain ran, without the financial crisis he still would have had a shot.