Todays prognosis:
On the Republic
an side, outspoken South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said that by every economic standard, Mitt Romney should be headed for a win over President Barack Obama, with coattails for down-ticket offices.
But in acknowledging a trend in the polls against the GOP standard-bearer, Graham said it would show that America’s demographics have so changed — in Democrats’ favor — that a president’s stewardship of the economy no longer is a deciding factor.
“If we lose this election, performance as president doesn’t matter like it used to,” Graham said in a discussion with The Huffington Post and several other reporters outside the Senate chamber last week.
“There’s a reason no president has ever been reelected with an economy like this,” Graham said. “It would tell me that it’s more of a demographic race for president than it is a performance-based race. And that may be where we’re at as a nation, and maybe where we are as a party, and we just don’t know it.”
Graham, who said earlier that the country wasn’t “generating enough angry, white guys” to keep the GOP in business, was referring to the growing trend of Republicans depending on white voters to win elections.
It’s a startling admission from a Southern white politician, but one he stood by. “If he’s able to do this, President Obama’s rewritten history,” Graham said. “If we lose as Republicans, we’re going to have to ask ourselves, who are we going to be? If we don’t beat this guy, who are we going to be?”
