Does Mitt Romney Realize The Election Is Only 41 Days Away?

I’m not entirely sure:

 ”Frankly at this early stage, polls go up, polls go down.”

Umm Mitt, “early” would have been back in June and July when your campaign went dark while your opponent relentlessly attacked you.

H/T: Taegan Goddard

FILED UNDER: 2012 Election, US Politics, ,
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. Koda says:

    Honestly though, what’s he gonna say at this point?

  2. Me Me Me says:

    In the past six months, Mitt Romney has had absolutely nothing on his calendar – not even a fundraiser – on 70 days. For every two days he is in on the campaign trail, he takes on off. Over the comparable period he’s had twice as many days off the campaign trail as did John McCain, who was 72 years old at the time.

    Furthermore, Mitt Romney has been running for president now for 5.75 years. And yet, he is going to take another 5 days off the campaign trail to prep for the first debate next week.

    How is it possible that he’s been running for President since January 2007 and yet he needs 5 days to get ready for a debate?

    There is something wrong with Mitt Romney.

    It is glaringly obvious that when he is the least bit tired or rattled the chasm between his brain and his mouth becomes gargantuan.

    It is no coincidence that when he want to London, the combination of jet-lag, tiredness and unfamiliar surroundings pushed the gaffe-count off the chart.

    He doesn’t need 5 days to cram for the debate, like Sarah Palin; he needs 5 days to rest to insure that his brain is working.

    He is physically/constitutionally not up to the job of being POTUS.

  3. legion says:

    I think he truly believes just showing up is the hardest part of his job – and it may be the hardest part of any job he’s ever actually held. All he has to do is display his awesomeness, and he’ll be elected by acclamation – they just have to _see_ how perfect he is for the job.

  4. bill says:

    guess he’s laying it on the line with the debates? i don’t live in a battleground state so i see no advertising/campaigning from either.

  5. Kylopod says:

    @Koda:

    >Honestly though, what’s he gonna say at this point?

    That occurred to me as well. I mean, it’s fun to make fun of Romney at this point, but I don’t think anyone’s ever come up with any tried-and-tested smart thing for a losing candidate to say. They can never admit publicly that they’re losing, because that’ll simply create a self-fulfilling prophecy, dampening the enthusiasm of their supporters and donors and inspiring at least some swing voters to cast their vote with whoever they think will win. So all candidates in this sort of position end up saying silly things like this (usually they invoke “Dewey Defeats Truman,” but this year, perhaps owing to the GOP’s rightward shift, Mitt invoked the 1980 election–and with it the myth that Reagan came from behind to defeat Carter). And in fairness, Mitt’s chances of an upset are probably greater than they were for McCain in ’08, Dole in ’96, or Dukakis in ’88 at comparable points in each race.

  6. Tillman says:

    @Me Me Me: Ah, so you’ve dropped the “mental illness from coma” angle and are now on a “dude has no mental stamina” bender.

  7. anjin-san says:

    Is this enough time for him to have windows that open installed on the campaign aircraft?

  8. Me Me Me says:

    @Tillman: Not “mental illness from coma”; mental difficulty resulting from traumatic brain injury – having no mental stamina is a symptom consistent with that.

  9. michael reynolds says:

    I’m worried about a pity vote or a dead-cat bounce.

  10. Hal 10000 says:

    Does Mitt Romney Realize The Election Is Only 41 Days Away?

    Our long national nightmare is almost over.

  11. Six weeks is a long time. If you’re actually the guy running, you can’t stay focused on the numbers. They fluctuate and you have to stay upbeat. This guys has been campaigning for so long, I doubt he can remember a time when he wasn’t.

  12. superdestroyer says:

    Who cares? Romney has zero chance of winning. However, I guess works had rather write about irrelevant candidates like Romney instead of speculating who will replace Hillary Clinton at State or what other changes will occur in a second Obama Administration.

    I guess actual policy and governance must bore most wonks and that is why they had rather waste their time focusing on personalities.

  13. Fiona says:

    I’m sure Mitt realizes that time is growing short (thank goodness!) but, as the candidate, he needs to keep hope alive.

  14. LaMont says:

    @michael reynolds:

    I’m worried about a pity vote or a dead-cat bounce.

    I think you’re on to something. All the media needs to see is a slight bump in Romney’s polling numbers and they’ll play it up as the beginnings of a come-back. I for one will not rest easy until about 11.30pm EST Novermebr 6th!

  15. Tsar Nicholas says:

    Well, 41 days is an eternity in politics. Shit, man, 4 days can be an eternity in politics. Don’t you remember the ’00 election? The week prior to Election Day that year W. Bush was on his “victory tour” in places like California for hell’s sake whereas Team Gore was on the ground in Florida, making Daley Sr. proud and Machiavelli blush. Then the DUI report came out. That was the Thursday before the election. The rest as they say is history. Or perhaps almost history. Depends upon one’s perspective.

    As for the whole polling nonsense, well, given that this is the Internet I won’t go full bore and thereby tilt at windmills. But just for shits and giggles go ahead and check out the final, late-October “polling” for the ’04 cycle for Florida by CNN/USAT/Gallup, by ARG and, gulp, by Fox News. Then also check out the final poll for the ’04 cycle for Ohio by CNN/USAT/Gallup. Juxtapose those two slates of polls against the actual results. Pretty astonishing, eh?

  16. C. Clavin says:

    Mitt has been running for President for 292 weeks. That’s 2044 days. He has 41 days to do what he has not been able to do in 2044 days. Good luck with that.

  17. ptfe says:

    @Tsar Nicholas: Wow, are you baked most of the time, or just when you comment? The final RCP polling analysis (state-by-state) from that year:

    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/bush_vs_kerry_sbys.html

    So polls predicted a Bush win? Remember that they’ve all got a +/- 3% margin, so the only real outlier there is the Fox News poll; removing that one poll pushes the RCP average for Bush up to about 2%. Bush won at 5%, which is within the MOE for the RCP average even including this outlier poll.

    And you completely ignore every other state, including Ohio (which polls got almost dead on) and Pennsylvania (which consistently showed Kerry with a slight lead, and which he won), Wisconsin (which showed Bush only barely ahead and which he lost by a slim margin), Iowa (which was dead accurate), etc.

    In fact, if you suck down all the information on that page and give it a look, applying margins of error to decide whether polls are accurate, you’ll find they’re pretty good, and the poll aggregating that RCP does is even better.

    This is why Republicans are putting up crap sites like Unskewed Polls: because they can’t wrap their brains around the fact that their candidate is losing. This isn’t one poll that says he’s down by some wide margin, this is a every single poll. If it were more evenly matched and they were questioning the finer points of the methodology, there might be something to it — indeed, polling firms themselves do just that — but when you’re taking all this negative data and having to make 50% of the electorate Republican to get the result you want, you’ve gone far beyond “correcting” and gone straight to “making sh!t up.”

    I’ll leave you with this:

    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/obama_vs_romney_compared_to_bush_vs_kerry.html

    And this:

    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map.html

    I hope you don’t get dizzy from all that spinning.

  18. Facebones says:

    You know, if I had $250 million, a beautiful mansion overlooking the ocean in San Diego, and a happy family, I would start to ask myself why I was so doggedly pursuing the presidency. Romney has no real message other than “It’s my turn.” Every time I see him, I see no real desire in him to be out campaigning for the job. (I think he’s the worst retail campaigner I’ve seen, and that includes Bob Dole.)

    So why is he doing it? I’d rather be watching pacific sunsets and drinking wine on my patio than listen to the red meat conservatives complain you aren’t being mean enough to Obama.

    But, that’s just me.

  19. LCaution says:

    I’ve asked myself the “why is he running” question a lot.He doesn’t like campaigning, doesn’t like “people”, and has no vision, nothing substantive he wants to achieve (I’m not even sure he really cares about lower taxes except as a slogan). He vacations more than 43.

    Hate to get Freudian here, but is he running just to one-up his father?

  20. Me Me Me says:

    @LCaution: He gets to be Top Mormon Ever.

    His only other route is to become head of the racket, but then he’d have to live in Salt Lake City full time. And he’d still have Harry Reid calling him once a month just to say “you know, I’m still ahead of you in the rankings…”

  21. Moosebreath says:

    @LCaution:

    Months ago, I answered the question as “he needs to check it off his bucket list”.