One of these things is not like the other
Why is Mitt Romney losing this election, despite having the advantage of a troubled incumbent and an advantage in overall money?
Yes, Mitt Romney isn't a very good politician. Yes, the Romney campaign team isn't a very good operation. Yes, Mitt Romney hasn't articulated a vision or a set of clearly defined policies. Nor has he been adept at handling the press. His effort to add weight to himself in foreign policy has been a disaster, even according to some conservatives. Furthermore, he is up against a gold medalist political athlete and a campaign team that is second to none. Still, these are the sort of inside the beltway and political junkie factoids that have little effect on the big picture. Take a step back and look at the forest.
Barack Obama has almost 70 million voters who have gone to a voting booth and signed their names to his flag. Making general assumptions about deaths and births, it is safe to say those roughly 70 million folks are still out there. Barack Obama's task is to convince all of those people to go and vote for him again. If he does that, he wins.
Mitt Romney, however, cannot merely convince the roughly 60 million voters who voted for McCain to vote for him. That's not enough. He also has to do one of two things: 1. He has to go out and find 10 million plus 1 new voters to beat Obama. Or, he has to convince 5 million or more Obama voters to leave Obama and vote for him.
It should be obvious that Romney's tasks are more difficult. Nevertheless, they are the only paths to victory. Despite this glaring big picture observation, Mitt Romney has not done either of the two things needed to win this election. He hasn't appealed to Obama's voters to switch sides because he hasn't articulated a message that would appeal to them, especially in the case of Latinos. Nor has he sought to expand the universe of the voting electorate by finding new demographics to enfranchise. He's just sitting there, waiting for the election to fall into his lap as if he is entitled to it and doesn't have to earn it.
Instead of doing the hard work, Romney has retreated into a zone of studied inertia. Perhaps the only thing he has done, astonishingly, is hold hard and fast to the positions and rhetoric he took in the GOP primary. There has been no attempt by Romney to move the target field beyond any of the folks who are already with him by default. In Beltwayspeak it is called "moving to the center." He doesn't seem to realize that he's 10 million votes short. Worse, he doesn't seem to understand that President Obama expended the electorate in 2008, bringing a lot of people into the process who probably would not have bothered to vote were he not running. Obama can lose a healthy portion of those voters and still win because many of them are either going to vote for him or not vote at all. This is the central reason why Romney is losing what should be a winnable election: Romney has a voter deficit he nor his campaign are addressing.
Even more devastating for Romney is that any attempt to do either of the two things that could potentially win him this election are off the table. The Republican base will not give him any room to deviate from right-wing orthodoxy even slightly because they don't trust him. Nor does he have the personal charm and charisma to excite and entice the uninterested voter to his banner. Romney is stuck, can't move, and doesn't know what to do.