Candidates race to finish line
Obama clinging to marginal lead against Romney
WASHINGTON — Against the backdrop of a sharply polarized nation, the long and mean-spirited 2012 presidential contest is barreling toward the finish with the outcome still in doubt.
President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney remain statistically tied in national polling, as they have been for much of the campaign. But the Democratic incumbent is clinging to a marginal advantage in enough key states to make him a slight favorite to gain re-election.
Analysts in both parties expect Tuesday’s vote to more closely resemble the tight 2000 and 2004 elections, whichcamedownto a single state, rather than Obama’s expansive 2008 victory. After more than three years of weak economic growth and stalemate in Washington, opinion surveys show an electorate more divided than ever, especially along lines of race, age and partisanship.
“The public is also divided about these candidates,” said independent pollster Andrew Kohut, who directs the Pew ResearchCenter. “Theylook at Romney now as a somewhat acceptable candidate, but they still have doubts about him personally with respect to trustworthiness and with respect to how empathetic he’ll be to people like themselves. They also have doubts about Obama and about his ability to turn things around.”
Romney has sought to frame the election around Obama’s handling of the economy, and an uptick in the unemployment rate allowed theRepublican to tell voters Friday that joblessness is worse now than when the president took office. At 7.9 percent, the jobless rate is also theworst on Election Day for any incumbent seeking re-election since Franklin Roosevelt.
But improving conditions have increased the public’s confidence in the economy, and Obama’s job approval rating has reached the 50 percent threshold in many polls, a level close to that of recent presidents who won re-election and higher than thosewhowere unseated.
In a cross-country whirl of rallies thisweekend, Obama and Romney tried to rev up the faithful and snatch the potentially crucial votes of late-deciders. Their itineraries reflected competing strategies of base mobilization and last-ditch persuasion, but the targets were the same: tossup states from the MountainWest to the Atlantic coast, with Ohio the biggest prize of all.
Both sides unleashed final volleys in a brutal air war that set a new standard of negativity for a presidential campaign. Wesleyan University’s Media Project said thatmore than1million presidential campaign ads have aired since June 1, most of them negative in tone.
That unprecedented level of attack advertising was facilitated by new developments in campaign finance that allowed new super PACs and nonprofit groups to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, including from corporations, labor unions and wealthy individuals.
For the first time, both presidential nominees rejected public financing, freeing them from campaign spending limits. All told, $2.6 billion has poured into the presidential race, including$450million from the groups, according to an estimate by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics
William Galston, a Brookings Institution political scientist, said that, for the most part, Obama and Romney aren’t to blame for the profoundly split electorate that they inherited in 2012.
“But they’ve done surprisingly little to counteract it,” he said. “Given the terms by which Obama rose to national prominence and conducted his initial presidential campaign, his reluctance to go against the polarized flow is a little surprising.”
He criticized both candidates for avoiding discussion in the debates of the so-called fiscal cliff — the postelection fight in Washington over taxes and spending cuts that was set in motion by the 2011 debtceiling deal.
Galston, a former Clinton WhiteHouse policy adviser, said that Obama had “made a bad situation worse” by running for re-election without laying out a detailed roadmapof a secondterm agenda.
Romney, too, has refused to give specifics about his plan to reduce the budget deficit and cut taxes while at the same time increasing military spending by as much as $2 trillion.
Independent analysts have said that his plan doesn’t add up.