Intrade has President Obama witha better than 60% chance of winning reelection and gives Mitt Romney less than a 30 % chance of upsetting him. Intrade, again, is not with very near term events as reliable as good polls or Nate Silver. However, with further out events, it adds common sense and context to give a reasonable prediction of future events. A consensus seems to be emerging that the unemployment rate will be below 8 percent by November. While historically high for reelection, voters care more about the trend, the direction of the unemployment rate than anything else.
Any criticism that does not acknowledge that the President inherited a terrible economy and has turned it around in a significant way will be rejected by most voters as dishonest and inconsistent with obvious facts. Claims which acknowledge the above two truths will be ineffective, especially when offered by a man whose rationale for running is simply that he feels it is his time to represent the one percent. Intrade bettors realize this. Furthermore, they have seen what a terrible and ineffective candidate Mitt Romney is. To say that Mitt Romney is tone deaf is an understatement. Thanks to OWS, inequality is in the forefront of the minds of the voters and a number of pundits. Yet, Willard has not adjusted to the demands of this election as well as his spineless nature would have suggested. Instead, he has made one blunder after another. The blunders come because his mistakes are deeply embedded in his way of thinking due to the life of privilege he has led. He simply has no clue how he sounds to the nonzillionaires among us. His missteps are precisely in the area of equality. He makes one statement after another supporting inequality as an acceptable status quo. Intrade understands this.
Finally, let us return to the overwhelming polling evidence of his weakness. When has this ever happened to a front runner who won the nomination and went on to win the general. To the best of my recollection, it has never, ever happened before. HRC lost the nomination. McCain lost badly in the general and even he did not have this experience. Here was someone who had already run for this office during the last election cycle. He was very well known and totally a mystery at one and the same time, a guy who will say that he supports whatever he thinks his current audience wants to hear. He had already spent tens of millions of dollars. He established organizational strength. He buried his rivals with merciless negative advertising. He had more money and more endorsements than any other candidate. He had no serious, viable competition. He had all the endorsements he needed. It was his time. The establishment backed him. However, 7 of the sorriest caricatures for a presidential candidate overtook him. We had Donald freaking trump ahead of him. Them insane Michelle Bachman. Then Herman 9-9-9 Cain and his sex spades. Then Rick Perry who could not name 3 federal agencies he would cut to save his political life. Then we had Newt Gingrich with 100% name recognition and 60% percent disapproval slaughtering him. Finally, Rick "Stone Age" Santorum cleaned his clock and even spit-shined it for him. Never, once, was Mitt able to rise during the flame outs of his rivals. Never, did he establish a positive rationale for his candidacy among voters. He always seems to have assumed that it was enough to be someone other than one of his fellow buffoons, assuming that any Republican would be President Obama due to the bad economy. Never mind that the bad economy was almost entirely of their making and it continued to be this bad for this long because the Republixan Party's entire governing philosophy revolved around making the economy suck so that they could defeat President Obama. Well, over a very long primary slog, Willard may find a way to amass 1145 delegates and beat Rick Santorum, but it won't happen quickly. And, as Jed said, it has come at a price. Mitt Romney has Already Been Defined for the general election. And that means he is done. His numbers among all voters and independents is way too low for him to be competitive in the general election. They will not come back up because they cannot come back up for the reasons already described in this diary. Political nature is at a state of equilibrium with Mitt and the monsters who vote in Republican Primaries. Welcome to your version of Dante: political hell. Just enough to bit your fellow nitwits but too insane to win in the general because of what you had to do to win the primary.