An observation about Obama and Romney

They show us polls that are close. I find it hard to believe those polls are that close.

The country is still split very much down the middle, regardless of whether the nominee may be bad. When there's a 2-party system, the opposing party is always guaranteed to win a large chunk of the vote. So except in rare cases, the Republicans are always going to get at least 45% of the vote.

Even in a terrible year in 2008, McCain still managed to get 46%

Nate Silver, who is a smart and objective analyst, only predicts Obama to get about 50-51% of the vote in November and predicts Romney will get about 48%.

Obama can still win by a large margin in the Electoral College, but winning the popular vote by a large margin is much more challenging.

How is this thing even close?

A small room.

During the summer McCain was up mostly while Obama and Clinton still battled it out.

We have yet to have a real "game change" moment for Obama like when it became apparent that Palin was a clear disaster (what reading materials do you read?) and the financial meltdown took a turn for the worse (I'm postponing my campaign!).

We have many more weeks to go but the truth is that Obama has had more good weeks than not. But the media is still pounding Obama hard because the do-nothing Congress refuses to help the job situation. Unemployement still is a serious issue, more serious than Rove's super PACs.

Other than that, I can't think of anything exceedingly "positive" that has happened for his campaign (so far). He'll get a lot of press coverage when he picks a VP and, depending on who that ends up being, may (or may not) give his campaign a bit of a boost, as will the RNC. I'm not quite sure exactly what will give Romney a little momentum. His strategy seems to mainly to chip away at President Obama's support among his key demographics- enough to slide into the WH. I doubt that it will be enough to do the trick. If any African-Americans might have been enticed to vote for Romney, his *performance* at the NAACP was hopefully enough to ruin those hopes, President Obama's mini-Dream immigration policy change seems to have undone his hopes at bringing down Hispanic support for President Obama. His campaign seems to be going after women now but IMHO he's going to have to give them more of a reason not to support President Obama other than the economy sucks (and most people remember who's to blame for that and it's not President Obama).

That he's beating Obama in fundraising every month. That worries me.