Unpopular Opinion Alert: Obama will be fine
Their fears are also playing out in the media, with the consensus that Obama clearly lost the first debate, Romney is on the rise, and Obama needs "Force, Vigor and Fire" in "The most important debate in the nation's history" (We can save that debate for another blog).
Therefore, I would like to sound the Unpopular Opinion Alert, and state that Obama is just fine at the moment. Here are five reasons for the Obama supporters not to worry:
1) The first debate favors the challenging party, especially when the incumbent party features a sitting president. There are a number of reasons for this, chiefly that the challenger is usually a professional campaigner, coming off a series of televised debates, a task the president hasn't taken on in four years. The opposition also relishes its first opportunity to have the president addressed directly. Sam Popkin, a political scientist from UC-San Diego also how a president bristles at being questioned the first time, with his story of prepping Jimmy Carter to debate Ronald Reagan. Want evidence? Here are the shifts in the national polls after each debate since 1988, the pattern is clear.
2) While Obama's polling average has declined since that debate, it's easy to conflate his debate performance with the dissolution of his convention bump. Obama's numbers were probably over-inflated after his convention. I believe this could have been due to the Republicans scheduling their convention so soon before the DNC, which robbed them of their own bounce.
3) Obama's "poor" performance in the first debate (I stress poor in quotes, because as I watched without social media or any commentary I scored it very close to even), has done the task his campaign was unable to do before the debate: lower expectations. We've seen these two men debate quite a bit over the years, and neither one of them is exceptional in a positive or negative direction. If Obama performs to the same even level, with the differential expectations (and the people on the right expecting Romney to wipe the floor with POTUS) he will appear to be a big winner.
4) The subject matter, specifically talking foreign policy in the final debate, favors the President. Besides the Olympics, Romney's authority on foreign affairs is limited and he will face the same challenge as Paul Ryan - trying to sound like he knows what he's talking about when his opponent clearly does.
5) Fundamentals: I can't aspire to be a political scientist without a belief in the power of the economy and the country's partisan identification breakdown to determine an election such as this. Since the last debate the unemployment rate dropped below 8% for the first time in his administration and consumer confidence, as shown through retail sales, is on the rise. The country's economic conditions are still the key factor, and while they've been tenuous, they seem to be trending up, just in the nick of time for the Obama administration. And in terms of the partisan breakdown of the country, there's so many polls these days, people can pick and choose to make whatever point they would like, but the Democrats seem to be polling well in the Senate races, which may bode well for that party.
