November 5, 2012

Why Romney Will Win

Hatched by Korso

Let me start out by saying this is completely unscientific, largely anecdotal, and conceived under the influence of some St. Bernardus Christmas Ale -- but since it all still seems logically sound the next morning, I'm going to go out on a limb and tell you why I think that at the end of Tuesday night, Mitt Romney will emerge as president-elect of the United States.

  1. Polling. It isn't so much that I have a tremendous amount of faith in polling data; but given that most of the surveys done so far have oversampled Democrats anywhere from six to eleven points, it's astounding that Romney is tied or even ahead of Obama by a point or two. I don't, however, believe that the electorate favors Democrat turnout nearly that much, which means that the support Obama actually has is probably overstated by several points.
  2. Enthusiasm. The Romney campaign has been like one of those little sleeper movies that builds an audience by word of mouth, week after week until it finally turns into a box-office juggernaut. Ever since his stellar debate debut against Obama, the Republican base has been fired up about Romney in a way I haven't seen since -- well, probably since Reagan ran against Mondale in 1984. That kind of enthusiasm is contagious, as we've seen from the massive crowds that Romney has been drawing. When you've got 30,000 people in the audience -- and you're in Pennsylvania, for frak's sake -- you know that there are plenty of non-Republicans who have joined the party as well. There's just a general sense that this is Romney's moment, which will only attract even more voters as election day comes.
  3. The alienation factor. Barack Obama ran in 2008 as a centrist and then immediately made a sharp left turn after he got to the White House. In the process, he betrayed a lot of independents and moderate Republicans who bought into his Hope 'n Change shtick. Since then, he's tacked even harder to the left in order to shore up his base. A lot of Catholics who voted for Obama were outraged by his mandate that religious institutions provide insurance coverage for drugs and procedures that violate their faiths. Ditto black evangelicals over Obama coming out for gay marriage. These are not people who will vote for him again. And while all of them may not go out and vote for Mitt Romney, some may just decide to stay home. Either way, Obama gets a smaller portion of a shrinking voter pool.
  4. Common sense. Americans are a fair people. Obama came to them in 2008 with a paper-thin resume and no executive experience, but with a grand (if risible) vision of a post-partisan, post-racial nation that could do great things if everybody worked together. It sounded good, so voters gave him a chance. Since then, though, Obama has failed to deliver on almost every level. Rather than unite us, when things got tough he fell back on the old Saul Alinksy/community organizer playbook and tried to pit rich against poor, black against white, women against men. Rather than act as a responsible steward of the public's money, he spent wildly on a stimulus that left nothing to show in its ruinous wake. And rather than focus "like a laser" on jobs as he promised, he spent two years ramming through health care "reform" that nobody wanted, and that America could ill-afford. The country is more divided, more insecure and more broke than ever before. Americans believe rightly, fairly, that it's time to give someone else a chance.

So there you go. With any luck, we'll know early on Tuesday night if I'm right or not. Might not be a bad idea to stock up on some more beer, though.

Dafydd adds: I prefer tawny port. Graham's 10-year tawny is excellent, and BevMo typically has it on sale for less than $30 a bottle. If you're well heeled, the best port I've personally tasted is Sandeman's 20-year tawny port; but I rarely purchase it, as it demands something north of a Useless S. Grunt (half a century) per bot.
Korso adds: My old college town has a great little winery, Messina Hof, that makes a world class port called Papa Paulo Texas Port. It won't cost you an arm and a leg -- and they ship, too!

Hatched by Korso on this day, November 5, 2012, at the time of 7:54 AM

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