Quote:
Originally Posted by MarkC1984
I heard on one of the News channel earlier tonight that the way Obama has handled the Sandy crisis has won him some new voters, many of whom intended to vote for Romney before Sandy hit.
I think Obama has responded much better than Bush did to Katrina, lessons were learnt from that storm. It's a shame that Katrina had to happen to make people take seriously the threat of hurricanes and tropical storms.
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It's very hard to quantify what bonus this has given Obama.
We do know that polls have said they a massive amount of Americans have approved of the way he has handled the issue and they he has been praised by a Republican governor. A new round of polls yesterday have shown that Obama has closed the gap on
Romney in the national vote which he has been behind in by an average of 1% point for weeks. Obama has also maintained or
extended his lead in Ohio which looks like will be the deciding state unless something amazing happens elsewhere.
These polls do not take into account the reaction to the storm response because it's too early for them to be in there. It's unlikely to swing anything a lot because we're so close to the election and there are few people left who are undecided. However even a very modest bump, given Obama's current position, could be massive for him. If this means most of those left to decide go to Obama then he has probably won the election given his position in Ohio.
It also stops the 'Romney momentum' and probably means the states where Obama may have been at risk to a late surge (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) are out of reach for Romney giving him no other path to the White House than Ohio. He no longer looks like a failing candidate, he looks like a President.