Obama Adviser: Independents Will Decide Election

June 25, 2012 RSS Feed Print

A senior strategist for President Obama says the November election will be decided by 15 per cent of the electorate--swing voters who haven't firmly made up their minds whether to support Obama or Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

Such voters are "waiting to be persuaded," and much of the effort by Team Obama during the four months until Election Day will be devoted to courting them, the aide says.

In the end, Romney's approach to the economy, the Number One issue, won't go over well with the swing voters, the aide predicts. "On the core economic issue, he has a philosophy that if a guy like Mitt Romney does well, then America will do well," but the aide said that this theory has been proven wrong over the years. Romney is a multi-millionaire who co-founded a highly successful private-equity firm.

[See a collection of political cartoons on the 2012 campaign.]

The adviser's view about swing voters was buttressed by a new Associated Press/GfK poll. It found that 27 percent U.S voters remain "persuadable" by either Obama or Romney and they are in no hurry to make a final decision on which candidate to support.

The poll found that 47 per cent of registered voters plan to vote for Obama and 44 per cent plan to vote for Romney, a statistical tie. But those totals include the 27 per cent who identify themselves as "persuadable"--people who say their current leaning isn't strong and could change by Election Day. The persuadables tend to be independents rather than Democrats or Republicans, the poll indicated, and 17 per cent of the persuadables said they consider themselves supporters of the conservative Tea Party.

Ken Walsh covers the White House and politics for U.S. News. He writes the daily blog, "Ken Walsh's Washington," on usnews.com and is the author of "The Presidency" column in the U.S. News Weekly. He can be reached at kwalsh@usnews.com and on Facebook and Twitter.