On RealClearPolitics, Caitlin Huey-Burns takes an extensive look at the shifting shale in Pennsylvania and why Republicans are optimistic on their chances in the Keystone state:
Romney will surely have to put up a strong fight to win Pennsylvania, which hasn’t gone Republican in a presidential election since 1988. Obama won the Keystone State by 10 points — a wider margin than his predecessors — and the RealClearPolitics polling average shows him leading here by 7.8 percentage points. Yet Republicans see an opportunity among the working-class “Reagan Democrats” who swung their way a generation ago. Polling and data suggest these voters may not be returning to Obama in November. But will they necessarily turn out for Romney? And to Silvis’ point, what can Romney do to woo them?
Among the reasons for optimism for Romney’s chances are the following:
- Independent voters are breaking for Romney by 6-points over Obama according to a Quinnipiac University poll
- Romney does better than McCain was doing in the state at this point four years ago; the Romney campaign is fighting hard for every voter, including sending out personalized emails last week encouraging individual registered Republicans in Pittsburgh to help create personal networks of local activists to talk about Romney and encourage support for his campaign
- There are a lot of conservative Catholic Pennsylvanians who may not like Obama’s contraceptive mandate. The contraceptive mandate may already be more of an issue for Obama tham previously thought. At least one Catholic university in southwestern, Pa., which is essential territory for Obama to win, has already announced changes to its health-insurance coverage due to the Obamacare mandate
- Romney’s operation has been fighting for Pennsylvania for a couple of months now and isn’t letting up
- Romney doesn’t have to win Pennsylvania to win the White House, while the reverse is probably true for Obama….[and] if Romney decides to compete more strongly in the Keystone State, he could force the Obama team to spend more time and money there — resources that it could otherwise use in tighter battlegrounds
With the Governor in Michigan, Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor takes its stab at the factors that could determine the outcome in the Great Lakes State:
Three reasons Michigan might be an attainable goal for the Romney campaign:
- FAMILY TIES. Michiganders of a certain age remember the state’s George Romney era fondly. A backslapping, genial ex-auto exec, Romney père presided over Michigan’s 1960s-era boom. His status as a moderate Rockefeller Republican could help counterbalance Romney the son’s drift to the right.
- REAGAN DEMOCRATS. In the 1980s, Michigan autoworkers defined the term “Reagan Democrat.” The state voted for Reagan twice and for George H.W. Bush once. White working-class voters are a particular problem area for President Obama, and they were a “dominant element” in the state’s electoral equation in 2008, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of Michigan demographics.
- DETROIT’S DECLINE. Big urban areas in general are Democratic strongholds, and Detroit is no exception. There’s a reason Democratic candidates often kick off their fall campaigns with a Labor Day rally in the union-centric Motor City. But Detroit isn’t what it used to be, Clint Eastwood Chrysler Super Bowl ads notwithstanding. The city’s population has fallen by 25 percent over the past 10 years, and its Democratic political machine is crumbling.
Three reasons Romney might better concentrate on Florida or other swing states more within his reach:
- WHAT FAMILY TIES? Nobody in the state under age 50 remembers George Romney anymore – that was a long time ago. The young Mitt went to Cranbrook, a private school as exclusive as any in the country. The auto industry’s lovely car ads are filmed there. They aren’t doing that at public high schools in, say, Flint.
- TWO WORDS: “AUTO BAILOUT.” Romney famously opposed Mr. Obama’s auto bailout, although he now argues that bailout followed a pattern he suggested. Whatever the details, this is an issue the Obama campaign will try to exploit throughout Michigan and the industrial upper Midwest. GM is alive, and it’s hard to exaggerate how much that means to Michiganders, even in the nonmean streets of Romney’s hometown of Grosse Pointe.
- THE POLLS DON’T LOOK GOOD. The latest RealClearPolitics rolling average of major polls puts Romney 5.4 percentage points behind Obama, 42.6 percent to 48 percent. The most recent individual survey wrapped into those numbers, a mid-June poll from Rasmussen Reports, had Romney down by a whopping 8 points. That’s not a fatal deficit, but it’s a fairly deep hole from which Romney will have to extricate himself to win the state.
