Associated Press
One
potentially dispositive question is what mix of Republicans and
Democrats will show up this election. On Friday last week, Gallup hinted
at the partisan makeup of the 2012 electorate with a small chart buried
at the end of its daily tracking report. Based on all its October
polling, Gallup suggested that this year's turnout might be 36%
Republican to 35% Democratic, compared with 39% Democratic and 29%
Republican in 2008, and 39% Republican and 37% Democratic in 2004. If
accurate, this would be real trouble for Mr. Obama, since Mr. Romney has
consistently led among independents in most October surveys.
Gallup delivered some additional bad
news to Mr. Obama on early voting. Through Sunday, 15% of those surveyed
said they had already cast a ballot either in person or absentee. They
broke for Mr. Romney, 52% to 46%. The 63% who said they planned to vote
on Election Day similarly supported Mr. Romney, 51% to 45%.
Furthermore, in battleground states, the edge in early and absentee
vote turnout that propelled Democrats to victory in 2008 has clearly
been eroded, cut in half according to a Republican National Committee
summary.
But doesn't it all come down to the
all-important Buckeye State? Here, too, the early voting news isn't
encouraging for the president.
Adrian Gray, who oversaw the Bush 2004 voter-contact
operation and is now a policy analyst for a New York investment firm,
makes the point that as of Tuesday, 530,813 Ohio Democrats had voted
early or had requested or cast an absentee ballot. That's down 181,275
from four years ago. But 448,357 Ohio Republicans had voted early or had
requested or cast an absentee ballot, up 75,858 from the last
presidential election.
That 257,133-vote swing almost wipes out Mr. Obama's 2008 Ohio
victory margin of 262,224. Since most observers expect Republicans to
win Election Day turnout, these early vote numbers point toward a Romney
victory in Ohio. They are also evidence that Scott Jennings, my former
White House colleague and now Romney Ohio campaign director, was
accurate when he told me that the Buckeye GOP effort is larger than the
massive Bush 2004 get-out-the-vote operation.
Democrats explain away those numbers by saying that they are turning
out new young Ohio voters. But I asked Kelly Nallen, the American
Crossroads data maven, about this. She points out that there are 12,612
GOP "millennials" (voters aged 18-29) who've voted early compared with
9,501 Democratic millennials.
Are Democrats bringing out episodic voters who might not otherwise
turn out? Not according to Ms. Nallen. She says that about 90% of each
party's early voters so far had also voted in three of the past four
Ohio elections. Democrats also suggest they are bringing Obama-leaning
independents to polls. But since Mr. Romney has led among independents
in nine of the 13 Ohio polls conducted since the first debate, the
likelihood is that the GOP is doing as good a job in turning out their
independent supporters as Democrats are in turning out theirs.
Desperate Democrats are now hanging their hopes on a new Quinnipiac
University/New York Times/CBS News poll showing the president with a
five-point Ohio lead. But that survey gives Democrats a +8 advantage in
turnout, the same advantage Democrats had in 2008. That assumption is,
to put it gently, absurd.
In addition to the data, the anecdotal
and intangible evidence—from crowd sizes to each side's closing
arguments—give the sense that the odds favor Mr. Romney. They do. My
prediction: Sometime after the cock crows on the morning of Nov. 7, Mitt
Romney will be declared America's 45th president. Let's call it
51%-48%, with Mr. Romney carrying at least 279 Electoral College votes,
probably more.
Mr. Rove, a former deputy chief of staff to
President George W. Bush, helped organize the political action committee
American Crossro
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