TAMPA – To hear Bobby Schostak’s forecast for the 2012 election, Oakland County holds the key to whether Michigan chooses a Republican presidential candidate. And Oakland, a traditional GOP stronghold, therefore could put Mitt Romney over the top in the national election.
Schostak, chairman of the state GOP, believes a win in Oakland County and an overall Romney victory both are “excellent” prospects on November 6. Ten fierce weeks of campaigning began this week with the Republican convention in Tampa and will continue with the Democratic conclave in Charlotte, N.C., which begins on Labor Day.
In terms of historic parallels, a Romney presidency would be remarkable for a state that never has sent one of its own to the White House – as opposed to Ohio, which boasts seven or eight (depending on how you count) native sons who have been elected president. Romney was born at Harper Hospital in Detroit and raised in Bloomfield Hills.
The event of a Michigan-born U.S. president also will hark back to the GOP’s roots, since the party’s first convention and nomination of Republican candidates was held in Jackson, Mich. in 1854. (A few months earlier the name “Republican” was suggested for the new anti-slavery party at a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin.)
Michigan figures in the party’s “3-2-1” strategy for unseating President Barack Obama, which requires a 270 vote majority in the electoral college. Under this strategy, the GOP assumes it must hold on to all the states won by Sen. John McCain in 2008, who captured 179 electoral votes. In addition to McCain’s states, candidate Mitt Romney must win three states that had previously been Republican but were taken by Obama in 2008: Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana.
On Tuesday morning, Rep. Eric Cantor, the majority leader of the House of Representatives, met with Michigan convention delegates, saying he believed that the GOP was going to take back Virginia, his home state. Cantor’s office thinks his district in Richmond will go for Romney. Northern Virginia, near the District of Columbia, will go for Obama. And the region around Hampton Roads, with a lot of military personnel, is a toss up. "
The “2” refers to the two big battleground states, Florida and Ohio, which aren’t safely in either party’s column. The “1” in “3-2-1” is from a list of eight states including Michigan -- which has 16 electoral votes -- that Obama won in the last election and are winnable this time by Romney. Traditional Democratic states like New Jersey, California and New York at the moment are regarded by the GOP as unwinnable.
In 2008 President Obama carried Michigan by 16 points after McCain announced that he was pulling out of the state a month before the election to concentrate elsewhere. The voter turnout, 66.2 percent of the 7.6 million of voting age, was the biggest ever; but it reflected mostly the enthusiastic tide supporting Obama. Polls show that Romney and Obama are running very close in the state, with enthusiasm for the incumbent running behind four years ago.
The GOP is banking on enthusiasm for Romney to rise. With economic growth weak, unemployment high and about 11 million households contending with mortgage debt that exceeds the value of their homes “Romney should be far ahead,” said Rusty Hills, chief of staff for Bill Schuette, Michigan attorney-general and state chairman of the Romney campaign.
Obama’s incumbency notwithstanding, the weakness of the economy should be an advantage for the challenger. “The GOP wants to get a bump in the polls from this convention,” said Hills. “It’s important for Romney to counter the Democratic effort to paint him as rich, privileged and out-of-touch – and then quickly to show how his program will get the economy moving,” he said. “That’s what Bill Clinton did when the GOP tried to paint him as a womanizer.”
So far, Romney has proven to be a much more disciplined campaigner than he has been portrayed in the mainstream media – but he’ll have to push his economic message hard, counting on voters in places like Oakland County, Michigan and Hampton Roads, Virginia to respond.