Despite Mitt's new aura of inevitability, his candidacy has been remarkably inept. He is having a lot of trouble beating horrendous rivals. His rivals are all super-flawed and have no money. Let's examine his rivals:
1. Rick Santorum: This guy is really dumb and runs a pretty amateur campaign. He's had trouble qualifying for ballots and making the most of his opportunities to get delegates. This shows incredibly bad oversight by his legal team and general lack of any sort of campaign organization. The guy talks about porn, speaking English, and contraception. Those are losing issues. First off, pretty much everyone is, at least secretly, pro-porn and pro-contraception. Secondly, the vast majority of voters speak English and have no problems with the language. Watching this guy's campaign is like watching Tim Tebow throw the ball. Sometimes its surprisingly impressive, most of the time you're left thinking...WTF???
2. Newt Gingrich: This guy has done a lot of cheating on his spouses. He thinks that his current wife, Callista, will help his image out. However, Callista was "the other woman" for 6 years. Do you think married women are going to trust someone who was be the woman that a husband cheated with for 6 years? Secondly, this guy has a lot of issues and has only one donor...Sheldon Adelson.
3. Ron Paul: The dude doesn't talk about popular issues. While his point of view has intellectual consistency, a value most of us crave, they are an example of logic gone wild. I mean, who is against Secret Service protection.
You might say...but Mitt is a moderate who is having trouble connecting with the increasingly conservative GOP electorate. However, Mitt was easily considered a conservative in 2008. Don't believe me, take a look at all of the county-based election maps. John McCain took all of the moderate counties while Mitt and Mike Huckabee split the conservative ones. For example, 2008 Mitt Romney won all of those conservative counties in Florida that 2012 Newt Gingrich won. Mitt has been the conservative candidate before and has no one to blame but his own messaging team this time around for his troubles with very conservative voters. Mitt is not having trouble with conservatives because of his "moderate" views, it's because of his bad image control in a primary where he's outspending all of his rivals combined by many multiples.
The fact that Mitt is having so much trouble dispatching this band of misfits is troubling at best for the Romney campaign.
Here are some of the other reasons Romney will have trouble with Obama (these are purely process-oriented reasons, as opposed to substance-based reasons):
1. He lacks a wide fundraising base. Only 10% of his money has come from donors donating less than $200 (compared with 40%+ for Obama, Santorum, Gingrich, and Paul). There are only so many wealthy people out there wanted to cut Romney's SuperPAC a check for $50k. His campaign and his SuperPAC have also been cash-flow negative for the past 2 months.
2. People "like" Mitt Romney (including both of my lovely office mates...at my work...they are both great people...I swear). But no one "loves" Mitt. Despite the difficulties of his first term, there are a lot of people who "love" Obama. That love manifests itself in a lot of ways which help campaigns win close elections such as campaign volunteering, door to door canvassing, driving old ladies to the polling place, phone banking, and voter turnout in general.
3. There is a lot of doubt over Romney's sincerity. He seems to have changed his views on about every divisive issue and the dog story isn't helping.
4. Mitt is like a crappy NFL team like the Cleveland Browns playing against Div. III college football programs. Obama is more like the Denver Broncos with Peyton Manning. Mitt having trouble with such weak competition doesn't bode well for the main event.
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