New Obama Ad Hits Romney on 47%

President Obama's re-election campaign released its first ad on Mitt Romney's comments about "the 47%" who receive government benefits or don't pay taxes.

"Doesn't the president have to worry about everyone?" asks the ad, which is airing in only one key battleground state: Ohio.

The ad comes a week after disclosure of a videotape from a Romney fundraiser this year.
The Republican nominee said Obama starts out with 47% of the vote because of people who either don't pay taxes or depend on government benefits.

According to the Obama ad, "Mitt Romney attacked 47% of Americans who pay no income tax -- including veterans, elderly, the disabled."

The ad also hits Romney on his own taxes, saying, "He keeps millions in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. He won't release his tax returns before 2010. Maybe instead of attacking others on taxes, Romney should come clean on his."

Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul responded to the ad:
"President Obama's tax increases on middle-class families will not make the next four years any better than the last four. Under President Obama's failed leadership, 23 million Americans are struggling for work with 46 million Americans on food stamps and more people in poverty than ever before. Mitt Romney has a plan for a stronger middle class that will lower tax rates across the board and jump-start economic growth, creating 12 million jobs."

Ohio Remains Crucial for Romney

A multiday bus tour through Ohio by Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan this week further shows the state's significance in the presidential race but also comes as a new poll shows Ohio presents an uphill battle for the GOP ticket.

President Obama, who will also make stops in the Buckeye State this week, leads Romney 51%-46% among likely voters, according to a new poll by the Cincinnati Enquirer/Ohio Newspaper Organization.

 

The lead is within the poll's margin of error -- showing the state remains a tossup a little more than a week before voters can begin heading to the polls. The poll corresponds with the Real Clear Politics average of recent surveys that have Obama leading Romney in Ohio by 48.8%-44.7%. (Obama won the state in 2008, 52%-46% over Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.)

 

Ohioans can begin early voting as of Oct. 2. Both campaigns and outside groups supporting each side have spent heavily in the state. So far, $122,485,400 has been spent in Ohio alone, according to an NBC News analysis. Obama and his supporters are outspending Romney and his allies $64,085,768 to $58,399,632, respectively, NBC News reported.

 

Democrats are also outspending Republicans for get-out-the-vote efforts and other party organization, records show.

 

In July, federal campaign-finance records show, the Republican National Committee gave $35,800 to the Ohio GOP, while the Democratic National Committee gave about $1.1 million to its Ohio counterpart. The RNC appeared to step up the effort in August, transferring $552,000, while Democrats transferred more than $2.3 million.

 

Such an advantage means the Democrats have more money to open field offices, run phone banks and use computerized records to identify voters and get them out to vote.

 

The poll shows Obama opening up a lead across all age groups, except those respondents 65 and over who favor Romney. As in several other swing states, Obama has a strong lead among women.

Ryan will kick off the bus tour in Lima, Ohio, on Monday and continue to Cincinnati on Tuesday. Romney will travel to the state Tuesday, starting with a stop in Dayton, then continuing up through the state Wednesday with rallies in Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo.

 

Obama will be in the northern part of the state Wednesday, making stops in the college towns of Bowling Green and Kent.

 

Both Romney and Obama will use their trip through the Buckeye State to emphasize their respective plans for the middle class.

 

The trip comes as the Romney campaign tries for the third time in as many weeks to get its message back on his plan for the economy and away from a series of gaffes and distractions that have plagued it for much of September.

 

The most recent misstep came Monday after Mother Jones magazine released a video of Romney saying 47% of the electorate was out of reach for his campaign because of their dependence on the government.

 

"There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what ... who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it," Romney says on the video, which was taped with a hidden camera. "And so my job is not to worry about those people -- I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

 

After the video's release, Romney defended the comments, made during a closed-door fundraiser in May, saying they were "inelegant" but part of an important debate about the role of government.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told Fox News Sunday that in the next six weeks, Romney has to "get off the heels" and "get out and charge forward."

 

"I think Americans want a fighter," Walker said. "He just needs more of an opportunity to get beyond some of these sidebar issues."

 

In an interview on CBS' 60 Minutes aired Sunday, Romney said that he wasn't concerned about the polls and that his campaign did not need an overhaul, which some conservatives have suggested in recent weeks.

 

"Well, actually, we're tied in the polls. We're all within the margin of error," he said, according to excerpts of the interview. "We bounce around -- week to week -- day to day. There are some days we're up. There are some days we're down."

 

Romney said his campaign "was doing a very good job."

 

"We've got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent president of the United States," he said.

Though nationally the race remains tied, Romney has begun to fall behind in several recent polls of swing states. Some polls this week showed him down 4 to 7 percentage points.

 

Romney also addressed his 47% comments during the interview.

 

"(N)ot everything I say is elegant," he said. "And -- and I want to make it very clear -- I want to help 100% of the American people."

The New Focus: Early Voting

Today is Election Day. And so is tomorrow. And the day after that.

By the end of September, voters in 30 states will start casting early or absentee ballots in the presidential race — a fact that both poses challenges for the campaigns seeking to make their final pitches as well as raises the stakes between now and Nov. 6.

Absentee ballots have been mailed out in key swing states like North Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. In South Dakota and Idaho — firmly red states — early voting began Friday, and in-person early voting in the crucial swing state of Iowa begins this Thursday.

“It’s no longer Election Day; it’s election two months,” said Pete Snyder, the Republican National Committee Victory chairman in Virginia.

Four years ago, just under 40 million people — about 30 percent of the total electorate that year — voted early, and experts expect that number to spike even higher in 2012.

Neither the Obama nor the Romney campaigns are taking any chances. Both are deploying aggressive turnout operations to target early voters and realize that they could make the difference in the tight race. Barack Obama won the early vote in 2008 by encouraging less traditional voters like the young and minority groups to turn out early, and is doing so again. Mitt Romney’s camp says it isn’t focused on any specific demographic groups in its early voting efforts.

Furthermore, the slew of voters casting their ballots this far out from Election Day significantly changes the calculation for campaigns and outside groups making decisions about where to invest their ad dollars. If a campaign or outside group is stockpiling its campaign cash for the final weeks and a third of voters have already voted, those ads won’t make a bit of difference.

And when a good chunk of voters have already cast their ballots before they air, it’s possible that debates won’t have a widespread impact on the electorate.

“Early voting changes your thinking about when you put ads on the air,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres said, adding that he thinks on the presidential level ad spending will be consistently high in the final stretch of the election.

The start of early voting also means that the daily tussle of the campaign — whether the release of Romney’s secretly taped 47 percent remarks or the president’s tough Univision interview — is likely to have outsize impact on voters’ decision making. Where once a gaffe may have been ignored or unnoticed, it now may be the last thing a voter remembers before casting his or her ballot.

“When early voting begins, you want your campaign to be firing on all cylinders, be on the offense and have some momentum — which is clearly not where the Romney campaign is right now,” said GOP strategist and John McCain ’08 adviser Steve Schmidt.

In 2008, early and absentee voters made up a substantial portion of the electorate — in some cases, more than half of it. Colorado had the highest number of such voters, with a full 79 percent casting their ballots early. In Nevada, that figure was 63 percent; in North Carolina, it was 61 percent; and in Florida, it was 52 percent.

Early voting used to be largely for people who physically couldn’t make it to the polls on Election Day, such as members of the military, business people who travel frequently for work or seniors who needed assistance getting to the polls.

But that’s changed as early voting becomes increasingly popular and accessible. In 2008, the Obama campaign worked to get traditionally less-reliable demographic groups, like young people and minorities, to vote early — giving Obama an early-vote edge that helped propel him to victory.

And this year, legal battles over early voting are still ongoing in two key states, Ohio and Florida. Republican-led efforts to reduce the number of early voting days in each state have come under fire from voting-rights activists. Ohio’s new restrictions were overturned by a state court, but the state has appealed the decision. Florida’s early voting schedule — reduced to eight days, from 14 in 2008 — is still being challenged by Democrats in the state.

Both sides have already started preparing for the onslaught of voters heading to the polls before Nov. 6, encouraging their supporters to head to the polls early and incorporating early voting education into their ground game in key states.

“Early voting is easy, convenient, and allows more Americans the opportunity to participate in the political process,” said Obama campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher. “By encouraging our supporters to vote early, we can focus our resources more efficiently on Election Day to make sure those less likely to vote get out to the polls.”

“While Mitt Romney and his allies are counting on big ad buys … we’ve made early investments in battleground states — where we’ve been registering folks and keeping an open conversation going with undecided voters for months — to build a historic grass-roots organization that will pay off when the votes are counted,” Fetcher continued.

The Obama campaign’s voter education sites, gottavote.com and gottaregister.com, both feature information about how to register and vote early or how to request an absentee ballot, in each state.

In Iowa, where voters can start in-person early voting on Thursday, state Democrats have been laying the groundwork for higher early turnout since just after the 2010 midterms. Obama won the state in 2008, but it is tightly contested this year.

“Our entire last two years here have been preparing for this moment,” said Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky. “It’s a little bit like the football season: We’ve got the summer training camp, the exhibition and now we’re ready to go.”

The Romney campaign, too, is unveiling what Romney political director Rich Beeson calls the “largest voter contact operation that a Republican presidential campaign has ever undertaken” in order to aggressively turn out Romney supporters early.

“The first stage [of the general election] is the ID phase, second phase is the persuasion phase and third phase is the GOTV phase. We’re sort of in that persuasion phase and GOTV phase right now with folks who have a propensity to vote early and absentee, or are likely to vote early and absentee,” Beeson said. “You can’t just have a 72-hour program anymore … you’ve got to definitely make sure you’re prepared for it and we are.”

Snyder, who runs the Republican Victory operation in Virginia, said the GOP will be pushing supporters to participate in early voting if they qualify and focusing on one-on-one communication with voters in key areas.

“You have an election that is going to be decided by 20,000 or fewer voters — early voting matters,” he said, adding that the GOP is using a “leave-no-stone-unturned approach.”

The stakes are high for both campaigns when it comes to early voting: Failing to place enough emphasis on owning the early vote could put either candidate at a disadvantage before the polls even open on Nov. 6.

Republican ad consultant Fred Davis, who worked with the McCain campaign in 2008, used the recent example of Arizona Rep. Ben Quayle losing his primary to Rep. David Schweikert as proof of the power of early voting.

“Quayle easily won the election on Election Day. What happened? His campaign peaked too late, and 80 percent of the citizens in that district voted early,” Davis said.

“A lot of lessons to be learned from that, but the largest one looming for the presidential contenders might be to treat early voting every bit as importantly as Election Day voting, and remember that the Obama team is masterful at turnout, both early and Election Day.”

Republican strategist Greg Mueller said he expects a heavier advertising presence in states that are beginning early voting.

“It’s important to start increasing the advertising,” he said. “We’re getting ads from both sides ad nauseam.”

Strategists argued that smaller day-to-day events of the campaign, often forgotten in the long term, have more resonance with voters casting their ballot shortly after they occur.

“What happens if you have a moment like Mitt Romney and his private fundraiser?” asked Democratic pollster Peter Hart. “… In the broader context of the election [by Election Day] people say, ‘No, it doesn’t matter, that was five weeks ago.’ If it happens the day before you’re going to cast your absentee ballot, it may be the single thing people think about.”

Beeson disagreed, saying voters will make their choices based on broader issues no matter when they vote.

“I don’t think anybody is going to be filling out an absentee ballot or walking into a polling place and saying, ‘I’m going to be basing my vote on some grainy video I saw of Gov. Romney at a fundraiser,’” the adviser said. “They’re basing their vote on who can strengthen the middle class and create more jobs.”

Republican pollster Ayres said that since early voters tend to be those with their minds firmly made up, a bad week for either candidate can’t dramatically change the outcome of the early voting race.

“My experience with early voting is that the people who vote early tend to be the more committed partisans. They decided long ago who they are going to vote for,” he said.

Schmidt said both campaigns have “extremely smart people” who will be tracking polls and public opinion every day to keep track of where they are in the early voting race.

“You’re going to be polling against it on a nightly basis and you understand what the effect of all this stuff is in real time,” he said. “Both campaigns have extremely smart people doing some really cutting-edge stuff from a targeting perspective.”

GOP Analysis: Romney Winning Middle Class

In early August, with our Republican analysis of the POLITICO-George Washington University Battleground Poll, we wrote “… this election will remain close until the final weeks of the campaign. There will be ups and downs for both campaigns throughout the next 13 weeks, but the basic dynamics that are driving this electorate and framing this election remain well in place.” Two conventions, and tens of millions of campaign dollars later, we continue to hold that belief. While there have been dozens of polls released during the past six weeks that have had Mitt Romney up by as much as 4 points and Barack Obama up by as much 8 or 9, those variations have had more to do with sampling variations than with real movement in the campaign.

Yes, there have been gaffes on both sides that have been the focus of both the news media and opposing campaigns, but the dynamics that have been the real drivers of the campaign, the economy and deeply negative feelings about the direction of the country, have not changed. There have also been negative stories about the internal operations, messaging and strategy of both presidential campaigns. In August, leading into the Republican convention, there were multiple stories about the Obama campaign operation and internal fights about both message and strategic direction that led one to believe the wheels were coming off. Now it is the Romney campaign’s turn.

The past several weeks have been filled with news stories, editorials and columns heaping criticism on the tactics and strategy of the Romney campaign. Many of these opinion pieces even suggested that Romney’s only hope for winning is to make substantial changes to his campaign. Much of this analysis is based on the premise that Romney is out of touch and has not been making an affirmative case to middle-class voters. His comments at a private fundraiser in May were pointed to as an illustration that he could never identify with and win the support of many middle-class voters. We took a special look at middle-class voters, and middle-class families in particular, in this latest POLITICO-George Washington University Battleground Poll and found that not to be the case. In fact, on every measure it is Romney who is winning the battle for the support of middle-class families.

Overall, Obama leads Romney by just 3 points on the ballot (50 percent to 47 percent) – which before we rounded up, is actually a 2.6 point lead and only up a half-a-percentage point from the 2.1 point lead for Obama in our last Battleground poll in early August. In our latest POLITICO-George Washington University Battleground Poll with middle-class families, which comprise about 54 percent of the total American electorate and usually split in their vote behavior between Republicans and Democrats, Romney holds a 14-point advantage (55 percent to 41 percent). Middle-class families are more inclined to believe the country is on the wrong track (34 percent right direction, 62 percent wrong track), are more likely to hold an unfavorable view of Obama (48 percent favorable, 51 percent unfavorable), and hold a more favorable view of Romney (51 percent favorable, 44 percent unfavorable) and Paul Ryan (46 percent favorable, 35 percent unfavorable) than the overall electorate. These middle-class families also hold a majority disapproval rating on the job Obama is doing as president (45 percent approve, 54 percent disapprove), and turn even more negative toward Obama on specific areas; the economy 56 percent disapprove; spending 61 percent disapprove; taxes, 53 percent disapprove; Medicare 48 percent disapprove; and even foreign policy 50 percent disapprove.

All of this data make clear that Romney has won the strong support of middle-class families and is leading the president on an overwhelming majority of key measurements beyond just the ballot. In fact, when respondents were asked who, Obama or Romney, would best handle a variety of issues, Romney led on all but one including the economy (+9 percent), foreign policy (+3 percent), spending (+15 percent), taxes (+7 percent), Medicare (+2 percent), and jobs (+10 percent). Ironically, the one measurement Obama led Romney on was “standing up for the middle class” (+8 Obama), reinforcing that often the Democrats win the message war with the middle class, but not their hearts and souls.

Looking at this presidential election overall, intensity among voters is high with Republicans, Democrats, and now independents, and is at levels more comparable with the final days of a presidential election than six weeks out from Election Day. In fact, fully 80 percent of voters now say that they are extremely likely to vote. Even with the past few weeks containing some of the toughest days of earned media for the Romney campaign, and perhaps as a surprise to Washington insiders, Romney continues to win Republicans (Romney by a net +87 percent) by the same margin Obama is winning with Democrats (Obama by a net +88 percent), and is still winning with independents (+2 percent). Romney has majority support with voters over the age of 45 (+7 percent), with men (+6 percent), with white women (+9 percent), and with married voters (+14 percent). In addition, Romney has solidified his base. Support among conservative voters exceeds 70 percent (73 percent), his support among very conservative voters exceeds 80 percent (83 percent), and his support among Republicans exceeds 90 percent (91 percent). Romney is also receiving a higher level of support among Hispanics (40 percent), which is driven by higher support from Hispanic men.   

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake has often made the point that Democratic voters are becoming more secular and Republicans more faith based. That certainly appears to be holding up in this election. Digging a little deeper on the presidential ballot, Romney has majority support (51 percent) among Catholics, which in past presidential elections has been one of the most predictive demographic groups of the eventual outcome. Even further, Romney is a winning majority across all religions amongst those who attend services at least weekly (59 percent) or monthly (52 percent), while Obama is winning among those who attend less frequently, never, or are nonbelievers.

For most voters, however, this election is still about pocketbook issues. Fully 66 percent of voters select a pocketbook issue as their top concern. The Romney camp should feel good going into the three presidential debates knowing he has majority support (Romney 53 percent/Obama 44 percent) from these economically focused voters.

In fact, even with all of the misleading partisan attacks on the proposals from Ryan to reform Medicare, a majority of seniors (61 percent) select a pocketbook issue and not Medicare as their top issue of concern and nearly 6 in 10 seniors (58 percent) are voting for the Romney-Ryan ticket.

In addition to their high level of intensity about casting a ballot, many voters are already notably engaged in the campaign. A strong majority of voters (60 percent) say they watched both the Republican and the Democratic national conventions. The ballot among these highly attentive voters is tied with 3 percent undecided. The conventions took a race that was a statistical tie, and simply drove up the vote intensity of all voters. At the same time, there are enough undecided and soft voters remaining for either candidate to win. In fact, even at this stage of the campaign, 13 percent of those making a choice on the presidential ballot indicate that they would consider voting for the other candidate.

A significant number of voters report that the upcoming presidential and vice presidential debates will be extremely (11 percent) or very (12 percent) important to their vote decision. (Twenty-six percent of Obama’s supporters currently place this high level of importance on the debates as does 20 percent of Romney supporters.) This means the debates are one of the best opportunities available for Romney to take votes from Obama. If Romney can continue to make a solid case about turning around the economy and the direction of the country in contrast to the president’s failed economic policies, these voters will be watching and many of them are currently Obama supporters.

Presidential reelection races are almost always about the incumbent and whether or not they should be given an additional four years in office. This race looks to be no different. There is no sign of any good economic news on the horizon and two-thirds of the American electorate is focused on pocketbook issues as their top concern. Fifty-seven percent of these voters disapprove of the job the president is doing on the economy, 62 percent disapprove in his handling of the budget and federal spending, and 54 percent believe that Romney would be better at job creation. Yes, Romney has the issue advantage with these pocketbook-focused voters, and is winning their support by 53 percent to Obama’s 44 percent.

More important, in this latest set of data in the POLITICO-George Washington University Battleground Poll, is the fact that Romney is also winning by a strong 14-point margin over Obama with middle-class families, a group of voters that is not only a majority of the American electorate, but is usually seen as the ultimate target group in any presidential election.

Police Don't Need a Warrant to Track Your Cell Phone

The federal Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that police do not need a warrant to track suspects using location data from their cell phones. Mobile phone users, the court said, do not have any expectation of privacy for data that emanates from their phones.

The decision stemmed from a case in 2006 when law enforcement agents intercepted phone communications from a known drug trafficker without a warrant. The information gave them the location and vehicle information for a buy carried out by a courier known as Big Foot. Using information obtained from Big Foot’s pay-as-you-go cell phone, police tracked the path of his RV from Arizona into Texas, then moved in to arrest him after he picked up a shipment of 1,100 pounds of marijuana.

Big Foot, also known as Melvin Skinner, was sentenced to over 19 years in prison. However, he appealed based on the fact that police tracked his phone without a warrant.

It doesn’t matter, the Sixth Circuit ruled, equating the phone tracking to more familiar methods of catching a crook. “If a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal,” the opinion reads. “The law cannot be that a criminal is entitled to rely on the expected untrackability of his tools. Otherwise, dogs could not be used to track a fugitive if the fugitive did not know that the dog hounds had his scent. A getaway car could not be identified and followed based on the license plate number if the driver reasonably thought he had gotten away unseen. The recent nature of cell phone location technology does not change this.”

Unsettled Law

Federal and state laws are still unsettled about exactly when law enforcement needs a warrant to obtain personal cell phone information. As far as location tracking, the United States Supreme Court ruled in February that police must have a warrant to attach a GPS device to a person’s car. Although the decision did not extend to cell phones, a concurring opinion signed by four justices said that it should.

The Sixth Circuit Big Foot ruling takes the opposite tack, reasoning that suspects using phones are circulating in public areas where they might reasonably be observed anyway. “The court rejected Skinner’s argument that the DEA agents never established visual surveillance of his movements, didn’t know his identity, and didn’t know the make or model of the vehicle he was driving,” writes Steven Schwinn, a law professor at the University of Chicago, on the Constitutional Law Prof Blog. “It said that Skinner’s movements could have been observed by any member of the public –and that he therefore had no reasonable expectation of privacy — even if they weren’t actually observed by DEA agents.”

Another professor notes that the court doesn’t fully resolve a distinction between police actively and passively tracing cell location data. “The opinion seems pretty vague on the technological facts,” writes George Washington University Law Professor Orin Kerr on the Volokh Conspiracy law blog. The court’s ruling goes back and forth suggesting that the police used GPS data that the phone automatically transmits to the carrier, and/or “pinged” the phone to find its location.

“The murkiness of the facts are particularly unfortunate because the reasoning of the majority opinion relies heavily on cell phones broadcasting location information as just part of the way that they work,” Kerr writes. “But if pinging the cell phone means actively sending a request to the phone to return its current GPS location, that’s not just how cell phones work: That’s the product of the cell phone provider setting up a mechanism by which the government can manipulate the phone into revealing its location.”

The opinion could be headed to the Supreme Court for a final ruling, but in the meantime anyone who carries a cell phone, criminal or otherwise, is subject to police tracking — without a warrant.

Where Do the 47% Live?

The Internet is abuzz with Mitt Romney’s remark that 47 percent of Americans pay no tax ^[1] and therefore can’t be expected to appreciate his message of personal responsibility, and so on. Since Romney sees the 53 percent of Americans who are net federal taxpayers as his natural constituency, you expect him to be doing especially well in the states where they live.

That doesn’t seem to be the case. Via @emsimpson, here is a map of federal income tax non-payment rates by state compiled by the Tax Foundation:

 

Of the states with the lowest non-payment rates, only three–Wyoming, North Dakota, and Alaska–are clearly in Romney’s column. These are also the states with the lowest population. On the other hand, eight of the ten states with the highest non-payment rates are solidly Republican. The exceptions are New Mexico and Florida. In short, Romney’s geographic base is in states where large numbers of households pay no net federal income tax.

Of course, it’s possible that all or most of these “lucky duckies” ^[3] are voting for Obama. But it’s more likely that Romney shares the delusion that the freeloaders and looters are concentrated in the Northern, coastal cities that Democratic dominate. Actually, the states they call home are the heart of his electoral strategy.

Why Barack Obama is Winning

Unemployment is over 8 percent. Nearly 60 percent of Americans, according to a new poll, believe the country is on the wrong track. The number of people on food stamps is at a historic high and the median net worth of American families is at a 20-year low.

If it was true that winning elections is mostly a matter of numbers — as some political scientists and campaign operatives like to argue — Barack Obama’s reelection as president should be close to a mathematical impossibility. For much of this presidential election cycle, Republicans were counting on precisely this.

But 2012 is proving that politics isn’t just about numbers, and some traditional leading indicators look as if they are losing their predictive power.

With Obama holding a narrow but so far sturdy lead over Mitt Romney in polls, many incredulous Republicans sound like the Michael Dukakis character in a 1988 Saturday Night Live skit: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”

The phenomenon is the result of three powerful factors, according to interviews with some two dozen political veterans from both parties.

The first is a rapidly changing, deeply polarized electorate — one in which external circumstances don’t necessarily swing large numbers of voters whose minds are deeply made up — and also one that, on balance, is becoming more Democratic due to demographic trends. In an environment like this, Obama has not seen his political bottom fall out, as happened to George H.W. Bush in 1992, when Al Gore cited a barrage of statistics and taunted, “Everything that should be down is up, and everything that should be up is down.”

But a more hardened political landscape also means that — at the margins — candidate skills and attributes matter more than ever.

Obama’s durability, according to polling and interviews, is the result of a unique connection with voters as someone who broke racial barriers in 2008, his ability to evade much the blame for the recession and a brutally effective campaign.

Romney’s inability to capitalize on trends with the economy and national mood that would normally create a wide opening for a challenger is in large measure a reflection of his own defects as candidate and failure to sell himself to voters, according to these same sources, many of whom are Republicans hoping to beat Obama.

“He came into the general election with a very negative [image] rating and he has not effectively addressed that,” said longtime GOP pollster Jan van Lohuizen, who worked for Romney in 2008. “What they’ve been doing for five months hasn’t worked. At some point, they need to come to the conclusion that it’s not worked.”

“We’re running a good campaign so far but we’re not running a great campaign,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). “We’re going to have to run a great campaign to beat this guy.”

Below are the three political engines that are helping Obama defy the traditional laws of political gravity:

A Democratic landscape

The state-by-state polls this fall make it clear: The 2008 presidential election was no anomaly. The Upper South and interior West are now competitive terrain and will be in future White House races. That means Democrats have more margin for error than Republicans when it comes to cobbling together 270 electoral votes.

“The map has changed to give any Democrat the better grip on the electorate,” said van Lohuizen.

As more voters, both transients from other states and immigrants, have poured into states like Nevada, Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina, political demographics in these places have been transformed. It’s the new Democratic coalition there and in traditional swing states that is bolstering Obama.

“Despite a high unemployment rate, anemic economy, and upside-down right track/wrong track, Obama is being kept afloat by a solid base of support among African-Americans, Hispanics, liberals, single and college-educated women, and union households,” said longtime Christian conservative strategist Ralph Reed. “Those groups alone add up to about 46 percent of the electorate.”

Plus, Republicans have their own firm conservative base that doesn’t move based on exterior conditions. So in this polarized era, there are just more entrenched voters — individuals who don’t split their tickets and move from their party loyalties as they did in the past.

“The number of people we’re trying to win over is very small,” said longtime Republican Don Fierce. “That’s what’s different from 1980 or other campaigns in the past — there’s such a small number that are there to move.”

What helps Democrats is that the country’s changing face has let them play offense on traditionally Republican turf without having to worry about liberal bulwarks. The population-heavy coastal states Democrats have had a lock on for two decades remain out of reach for Republicans.

Former Democratic Florida governor and Sen. Bob Graham, who held statewide office for 26 years, recalled that in 1980, the number of electoral votes that were considered solidly Democratic and Republican were about equal.

“Now, that number is noticeably tilted toward Democrats,” Graham said.

The problem for the right is that what Democrats have steadily lost with lower middle-class whites over the years, they’ve made up for with middle-class and wealthy women — creating a yawning gender gap that puts Republicans at a disadvantage in the very states that now make up the presidential battlegrounds.

“We lost Bubba a long time ago; he’s done,” said Democrat James Carville of working-class white males. “But what we didn’t realize at the time is that we picked up all the post-college white women by the same amount. You walk into any grad school class today, the women are all our voters.”

And, Carville added, it’s both racial minorities and such working women who are uneasy about some of the nostalgic language Republicans use when it comes to taking back the White House.

“They keep saying they want to restore America — but to a vast number of Americans, they weren’t part of that America,” he said.

What frustrates Republicans the most, and will surely be Topic A for many in the party if Romney loses, is the party’s apparent structural problem with Hispanics — something that is hampering the nominee in Florida and the West.

“Republicans, including Romney, hurt themselves among Hispanic votes in the primary this year,” said former Mississippi governor and Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour, alluding to the hard line GOP candidates took on immigration. “And you add to that Obama has totally politicized the issue of immigration to the point that he preferred having the issue to having a bill.”

Looking past November, Barbour added: “In the future, and not distant future, Republicans have to come to grips with the right policy on immigration.”

The incumbent’s staying power

In 2008, Obama marketed himself as a global phenomenon, and his political skills were widely described as something almost unworldly in origin. Hardly anyone — not even hard-core Obama loyalists — believes this any longer, after a first term of repeated setbacks and dwindling popularity.

But the fact that Obama has lost some luster shouldn’t diminish the fact that he remains in the minds of many voters a historic figure — not just another embattled incumbent.

As the first black president, his most durable strength is with minorities, whose loyalty is largely impervious to external factors like the economy. Minorities have been harder hit by the recession than whites, yet surveys show that they feel better off now than before Obama and are more optimistic about the future than whites.

“This is a huge thing in American history,” said Cole, a historian with a doctorate and Native American, about the pride in Obama felt by minorities.

But Obama’s sustained support isn’t just from loyal African-Americans and Hispanics, it’s also from white voters who are themselves proud of what the country did in 2008, retain warm feelings toward the president and his family, and don’t want to see them fail. This is not mere white guilt. Swaths of centrist voters believe the president inherited a mess and that George W. Bush and the Republicans are more to blame for the dismal economy than Obama and the Democrats. A CNN poll earlier this month had 62 percent of “moderates” faulting Bush and the GOP and just 30 percent of the centrists blaming Obama and the Democrats. It’s clear Obama possesses a measure of goodwill with many voters that doesn’t fluctuate with the monthly jobless statistics.

“People like his personality, like his family, like his story and what he says about the country just by having been elected,” said longtime Democratic strategist and presidential campaign veteran Bill Carrick. “And I think the other piece is that people really do believe he got dealt a really bad hand of cards. They’re willing to give him more of a chance.”

Further, Obama benefits from longstanding skepticism about just how much he or any leader is able to turn the country around.

“Expectations are lowered,” said one of George W. Bush’s most senior advisers. “With the exception of the short period after Obama was elected, there’s been a net wrong track since at least 2003 — that’s unprecedented and resets expectations.”

In the view of seasoned hands in both parties, Obama has also run the better campaign. Since the Dartmouth GOP primary debate in October, when they determined Romney was likely on his way to the Republican nomination, the president’s high command has been almost exclusively focused on trying disqualify the former Massachusetts governor. In an effort to pre-empt a pure referendum on the state of the economy, Chicago has spent the past year highlighting Romney’s business record, exotic investments and personal lifestyle to cloud what until recently had been Boston’s all-jobs-all-the-time message.

“I thought everybody assumed they’d run a very good campaign in 2012 and they have run a very good campaign,” said Barbour. “I don’t underestimate David Axelrod and the Obama campaign. “They’ve been very adroit at changing the subject.”

At the GOP convention, Barbour summed up the Obama message on Romney in perhaps the most memorable sound bite of the 2012 election: “He’s a wealthy plutocrat married to a known equestrian.”

Cole, a political strategist before he entered elected office, also offered praise for Chicago.

“They’re running a great race, well-conceived and well put together,” said the Oklahoman. “You contrast this to George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. This is really comparable in quality to Karl Rove’s campaign for Bush in 2004.”

Veterans in both parties cite the summer, when Romney had secured the nomination and was attempting to introduce himself to voters, as the pivotal period in which Obama’s taunting of the Republican was most effective.

“They’d say ‘Bain,’ or ‘tax returns’ or ‘felon’ and Romney would scream fire and we’d be talking about it for a week,” noted longtime Democratic consultant Joe Trippi.

Cole pointed to Romney’s deficit in Ohio as the most vivid example of the damage done to the GOP standard-bearer during the summer.

“If Mitt Romney doesn’t win, we’ll be reminded that negative ads work and the sooner the better,” he said, noting that Romney was financially unable to strike back with full force before the August convention. “They picked a good moment when Romney couldn’t respond as effectively as they would have liked. Super PACs are fine but they don’t let you establish the case for the candidate like the candidate’s own campaign.”

The challenger’s flaws

Romney’s advisers have started coming in for the predictable criticism that’s inevitable in a campaign that’s losing. But as big an issue is the candidate’s own profound weaknesses — he has a résumé that’s uniquely vulnerable to attack during difficult economic times and has little in the way of political self-awareness.

“Put any three consultants of either party in a room six years ago and you can’t tell me they wouldn’t have told him: Get rid of the Swiss bank account,” Trippi said. “He just seems impervious to what things sound like or look like and that they make people who otherwise might vote for him very wary.”

Beyond his background, Romney also is often his own worst enemy on the stump. Look no further than the video that came out Monday in which Romney is captured at a fundraiser earlier this year telling donors that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay income taxes and are essentially wards of the state. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” he said. It’s hard to imagine George W. Bush using such language in any setting, public or private.

What frustrates Republicans about Romney and his campaign is that they knew they had an image problem coming out of the GOP primary and he’s been unable to turn it around. An NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll last week in Ohio showed the Republican is still 10 percent “under water” in his favorable and unfavorable rating. And the national CBS/New York Times poll revealed more likely voters indicating “no” than “yes” when asked if they felt Romney understood their needs and problems.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who served as Bush’s point man on Capitol Hill in 2000 and does the same for Romney now, said the GOP nominee has a challenge that’s “the mirror image” of what Ronald Reagan encountered in 1980.

“People need to become convinced a person can do the job but also be comfortable about having them around for the next four years,” Blunt said. “People in ’80 were comfortable with Reagan as a person because they knew him but weren’t sure about him being president. People think Romney can do the job but are not ready to check that second box yet about whether this is somebody we want to have around in good times and bad for the next four years.”

Blunt, who thought Ann Romney’s speech was the most important of the convention because it put a warm face on the candidate, said Boston’s ability “to round [Romney] out as a person is important. We’ll see if they do some more of that.”

Asked if he thought they needed to, Blunt didn’t hesitate: “Yes, I do.”

What Republicans hope is that Romney’s difficulties relating to voters will ultimately pale in comparison to the job ahead of the next president. Yet even in making the case that policy matters more than persona, seasoned GOP officials concede Romney is a tough sell.

“He’s never had a beer, he’s never had a Coca-Cola, he doesn’t look natural out there — but I really don’t think this is an election cycle [in which] voters will decide based upon whether they can invite Mitt into the living room for a beer,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), an 18-year congressional veteran. “But he is somebody who you would call if you had a business that was in trouble.” (Romney, a Mormon, doesn’t drink alcohol but actually will enjoy a Diet Coke, something not barred by his church.)

Asked if his party had nominated somebody with difficulty relating to average Americans, Barbour artfully evaded the question, saying: “That’s what he’s got to do.”

Another former GOP governor, however, was blunter, arguing that Romney’s current deficit is explained in part by his personal style.

“He’s a rich guy who’s also awkward,” said the former governor. “That may matter at the margins, but in a tight race, 2 [percent] to 3 percent matters.”

This is not to say Romney’s strategy has been totally sound.

Florida’s Graham called Romney’s campaign “inexplicable.”

“He seems to have made an effort to run away from his record as governor in Massachusetts when in my judgment, that should have been one of his major strengths,” Graham said. “You ask Americans their biggest concerns and after jobs and the economy, they’ll start to talk about gridlock and partisanship. And, coming from a Democratic state, he’s got an ideal record to talk about that.”