Tuesday's Los Angeles Times featured a front-page article entitled Mitt Romney Campaign Impaired by Shift in Voter Attitudes by David Lauter.
It starts off with this:
Republican nominee Mitt Romney faces a fundamental problem as the presidential campaign moves into its final phase: Voter attitudes about the state of the economy have begun to improve, and enthusiasm about voting has risen among key blocs of Democratic-leaning voters, particularly Latinos.
This move towards Obama is certainly reflected in the polls we've been getting - especially from swing states - over the past serveral weeks.
Attitudes toward the economy have warmed in recent weeks. Measures of consumer confidence have begun to tick upward, voter outlook about future conditions has brightened after a slide during the summer, and the percentage of Americans who feel the country is on the "right track" has risen steadily — albeit slowly.
This is not necessarily great news for a campaign that has pretty much run on the assumption that the general public would be so dismayed by the weak economy that it would be eager to throw the incumbent out and put Romney in as a default option.
Romney has another problem to contend with.
At the same time, some Democratic-leaning groups whose enthusiasm about voting had lagged now appear to have started to focus on the campaign. The most noticeable shift has taken place among Latinos, whose enthusiasm about voting, along with their tilt toward President Obama, has grown substantially since the Democratic convention.
The assertion that attitudes towards the economy are improving appear to be backed up by a number of recent findings.
The evidence for voters growing less worried about the state of the economy and the nation in general comes from a large variety of surveys. The Thompson/Reuters University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment rose sharply this month — catching forecasters by surprise. Gallup's measures of economic confidence have similarly increased steadily since late August.
Another set of measurements comes from a question that polling firms have asked voters for years about whether the country is going in the "right direction" or headed down the "wrong track." To take one recent example, an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey released this month found 39% of voters saying the country was headed in the right direction. While that's hardly a ringing endorsement, it was the most positive rating the poll had found on that question since Obama's first year in office.
As to the Hispanic vote:
A weekly survey by the polling firm Latino Decisions for ImpreMedia, the owner of several Spanish-language newspapers, shows that over the last four weeks, Latino voters' support for Obama, already high, has risen by a statistically significant amount. More significantly, enthusiasm about voting, which often presages turnout, has gone up sharply.
Obama and his campaign have "worked pretty tirelessly to improve their image," said Stanford University political science professor Gary M. Segura, one of the founders of Latino Decisions. "They've taken a somewhat dispirited electorate and energized them."
The article ends by pointing out that rarely do the debates ever act as "game-changers" in presidential elections, and that only one candidate has ever come from this far behind at this stage of the race to win the presidency - and that's Harry Truman in 1948.
And let me just say, Mr. Romney, you ain't no Harry Truman.