Mitt Romney’s mortal enemy: Arithmetic

10/24/2012 10:11am by 557

Politico’s Playbook observes that for all of the Republican bluster about an imminent Romney victory, the numbers just don’t add up:

MORNING MINDMELD : As an antidote to the (perhaps) irrational Republican exuberance that seems to have seized D.C., we pause for the following public-service announcement. To be President, you have to win states, not debates. And Mitt Romney has a problem. Despite a great debate and what The Wall Street Journal’s Neil King Jr. on Sunday called a polling “surge,” Romney has not put away a single one of the must-have states. President Obama remains the favorite because he only needs to win a couple of the toss-ups. Mitt needs to win most of them. A cold shower for the GOP: Most polling shows Romney trailing in Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Iowa – by MORE than Obama trails in North Carolina. Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin reminded of us of the 2008 primary analogy: Whatever else Hillary Clinton had, Barack Obama had the math. And math, not momentum, gets you the big house, the bulletproof car, the cool plane. We now resume our regularly scheduled Playbook.

And Nate Silver’s latest tally over at FiveThirtyEight backs this up.

Nate shows Romney with 48.9% of the popular vote, to Obama’s 50.0%, but once you factor in the electoral vote, which is how you actually win a presidential election, Romney has a 31.9% chance of
winning and Obama a 68.1% chance.

By looking at the graphs on Nate’s site, you can see that Romney’s “surge” stopped around October 13 or 14, a few days after the VP debate, and a few days before the second presidential debate. From that date on, for the past ten days, Obama and Romney have remained stagnant in the popular vote, each retaining their share of the vote, while Obama’s chances of winning have steadily risen from 61% to 68%.

Jonathan Chait argues in NYMag that Romney’s “I’m winning, I’m winning!” is all a bluff. And let’s face it, it’s not like it would be the first time that Mitt Romney tried to convince folks that the truth has a liberal bias.

Also, this might explain why Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck freaked out after the third presidential debate the other night.

@glennbeck: I am glad to know that mitt agrees with Obama so much. No, really. Why vote?

@AnnCoulter: I highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard.

I quote them because they’re both egotistical enough to not care if they’re spilling the beans, and hurting their own party, by telling the truth.  And both said things you don’t generally say if you think you’re winning the election.

Also, I’m intrigued that Romney surrogate Marco Rubio, the new darling of the Republican party, disagreed publicly the other day with Mitt Romney over his China policy, suggesting that Romney would “hurt American businesses.”

Appearing on CBS’ Face The Nation Sunday, Rubio told Schieffer regarding labeling China a currency manipulator: “A trade war is not the right way to approach it and I think that if you label them a currency manipulator, that’s what it may result in, it would hurt American businesses.”

That’s not the kind of thing you say, two weeks before the election, when you think your guy has a chance at winning. It’s especially not the kind of thing you say, criticizing the business acumen of your party’s candidate whose main argument for the presidency is his business acumen.

It’s the kind of thing you say when you think your guy has already lost, and your setting yourself up as Not-Mitt-Romney for the 2016 presidential elections.

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@aravosis | Facebook | Google+. Editor of AMERICAblog, joint JD/MSFS from Georgetown, worked in the US Senate, World Bank, Children's Defense Fund, and as a stringer for the Economist. A frequent TV pundit, he has been on The O'Reilly Factor, Hardball, World News Tonight, Nightline & Reliable Sources. Full bio and .

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