Team Romney Theater: All this momentum — really! Look how excited we are! Landslide!!
NYTimes.com: “Cultivating the image that he is a winner, his aides say, could be Mr. Romney’s best strategy for actually winning.”
Mark Blumenthal: “While the [first] debate certainly boosted Romney’s standing in the polls, trends over the past two weeks have been negligible, with the leader seesawing nationally within a range of roughly one percentage point. Over the same period, the standings within the key battleground states have also remained constant. Other poll tracking models have shown the same patterns.”
Robert Wright: Romney Momentum Update: Still Zilch (at Best): “Yesterday I noted that, with two days of post-debate tracking poll results now in, it was starting to look as if that final presidential debate had killed the momentum Mitt Romney seemed to have going into it. Now, with three days of tracking poll results in, things look, if anything, a bit worse for Romney than they looked yesterday.”
Brendan Nyhan: The momentum behind a misleading narrative: “The notion that Romney still had “momentum” weeks after his early October gains in the polls has now been debunked by numerous commentators and academics. And while that pushback is increasingly reflected in campaign-trail accounts, it is worth taking a closer look at why coverage of Romney’s “momentum” went wrong and what it tells us about the weaknesses of campaign journalism.”
