I wouldn’t make too big of a deal out of this. Hell, I’d expect the non fundamentalist all American candidate to beat the pants off the separatist cult pandering to fundies, misogynist, and racists on anything approaching equality and tolerance:
Politico — Americans trust President Barack Obama over presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney on social issues, 52 percent to 36 percent, according to a new AP-GfK poll released Friday.
What a shock. The guy with the white mother and black father who worked his way up through Harvard Law might do better on issues involving equality and equal rights, than the prep school bully turned heretic GOP front runner.
What I’d make a big deal out of are the other polls. Nationally and state by state, Obama may have a slight edge. But it’s within statistical noise and Romney hasn’t even had his first meeting with Sauron and Sauraman yet. Word I’ve heard is there will be a wingnut jamboree full court press starting in the churches and related orgs like Oathkeepers and whatever astroturf has been cooked up by the usual suspects.
Listening to hard-core fire-breathing Christian preachers who consider Mormonism a dangerous cult explain why God-eh (Read: Mammon) really really really need their flock to reject a fellow believer and go with the separatist heretics will be damn entertaining. But that’s what they’re gonna do, with a mountain of dirty secret money behind them, and past experience suggest they’ll be at least partly successful. All they need to win this thing is two or three more points.
Five months to go till the US election .. Sigh.
(& I’m an Aussie.)
I’m calling it now – Obama by a bit. I hope. Surely?
Impossible to predict. American elections are impossible to predict this far in advance anyway, and this one is going to be especially difficult to call. If we go by historical data, Obama should lose (flagging economy = incumbent loses, regardless of who or what is to blame), but there are some serious problems for Romney and the GOP that make it more complicated than that: They have seriously pissed off women and Latinos; the GOP is between a rock and an increasingly hard place on LGBT issues; and then of course there is the magic underwear problem, which I do not expect to have a major impact but will siphon off a small percentage of the evangelical vote.
It’s easy to overestimate the impact of these issues, though, and I’ve heard some smart voices say the economy will dominate. Bottom line, who freakin’ knows.
Remind me again why we don’t tax churches?
My prediction: Obama by a nose.
If historical data was a predictor, Reagan should have lost in 1984 as unemployment that year was about the same as it is now. The reason why he won in a landslide was because the democrats nominated Mondale for about the same reasons the republicans are nominating Romney this year: It was his turn.