Politics

A Ray of Hope

Why today was a good day for Mitt Romney

Every day until the election, Slate will offer up one reason to be optimistic for your candidate.

39 days to go:

Today’s Good News for Romney: It’s been a rough week. He’s down across the swing states, and Obama is surging in most polls.

But Romney has been here before. In his gubernatorial race in 2002, Romney was trailing his Democratic opponent Shannon O’Brien by 6 to 12 points in mid-October. His own polling had him 10 points behind. Romney was losing among women by 18 points. (Voters hadn’t taken a shine to his early ads that showed Mitt and Ann Romney talking about their prom.) But with four weeks to go, Romney hit O’Brien with ads attacking her for $7 billion in state pension fund losses, with images of a watchdog sleeping on the job. On Nov. 5, he became Massachusetts’ Comeback Kid and won the election by 5 percent. (And hey, golfer Jack Nicklaus still believes in him.)

See Mitt Romney’s earlier rays of hope.

See Barack Obama’s earlier rays of hope.