Every day until the election, Slate will offer up one reason to be optimistic for your candidate.
Today is Election Day.
Today’s Good News for Romney: On Election Day, the math still isn’t in Romney’s favor, but it’s not over. Romney thinks his path to victory is to win 61 percent of white voters as long as white voters comprise 74 percent of the vote—and the Obama camp agrees. One campaign staffer told the Daily Beast the biggest fear was “a huge white turnout. Kind of like what Bush hit us (John Kerry) with in ’04.” The latest polls show 59 percent of white voters supporting Romney—the biggest racial split since 1988. Meanwhile, we already have the data on early voting, which shows that there were fewer registered Democrats voting early this year than there were in 2008 by a 4- to 8-point margin across swing states. Though the Obama camp has reason to be optimistic, they should be concerned about turning out the base, and the early voting numbers aren’t a great sign.
