2012 Polls Incumbent Rule, President Barack Obama continues to hold narrow leads in a handful of battleground states that will likely decide the election, but some argue that Republican nominee Mitt Romney will come out on top because Obama’s poll totals linger just below 50 percent.
The arguments are based on what campaign pollsters used to call the “incumbent rule,” the idea that when an officeholder seeks reelection, undecided voters would break decisively to challengers in the final days of the campaign. The problem is that such late shifts have become increasingly rare. They may never have been much of a factor in close presidential races and show few empirical signs of occurring among the undecided voters of 2012.
But that does not stop many pundits from saying that Obama poll results a few percentage points under 50 percent are a sign of impending peril. Writing in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, for example, Karl Rove argued that the polling “number that may matter most is Mr. Obama’s 47.2% share” of the vote, the number Rove gets when he averages 31 recent national surveys. “As the incumbent, Rove wrote, Obama is “likely to find that number going into Election Day is a percentage point or so below what he gets.”
The arguments are based on what campaign pollsters used to call the “incumbent rule,” the idea that when an officeholder seeks reelection, undecided voters would break decisively to challengers in the final days of the campaign. The problem is that such late shifts have become increasingly rare. They may never have been much of a factor in close presidential races and show few empirical signs of occurring among the undecided voters of 2012.
But that does not stop many pundits from saying that Obama poll results a few percentage points under 50 percent are a sign of impending peril. Writing in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, for example, Karl Rove argued that the polling “number that may matter most is Mr. Obama’s 47.2% share” of the vote, the number Rove gets when he averages 31 recent national surveys. “As the incumbent, Rove wrote, Obama is “likely to find that number going into Election Day is a percentage point or so below what he gets.”
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