By David Lauter, Tribune Washington Bureau –
WASHINGTON — The fight over Bain Capital that has absorbed the presidential campaign for the past week is a battle primarily for the disaffections of one crucial bloc of voters — non-college-educated whites in a handful of states that could decide November’s election.
In a race where the vast majority of voters long ago made up their minds about which candidate to support, neither attack ads nor most news events are likely to create more than a passing blip in national polls.
But with Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama locked in a tight match, their campaigns have both focused on much more targeted segments of the electorate in a few key states.
Blue-collar whites — a large, albeit declining, share of the electorate — are key to several of those states, most notably Ohio, where both candidates have campaigned often and where Obama spoke Monday. (Romney is due in Wednesday.)
Polls repeatedly have shown that those voters have little love for either candidate. White men in particular disapprove of Obama’s performance in office. At the same time, many of them are suspicious of Romney’s ties to Wall Street. They’re also skeptical, at best, about candidates with Swiss bank accounts, corporations in the Cayman Islands and financial histories as complex as the one Romney has at the Bain venture capital firm.
White voters in general — with and without a college education — made up just under three-quarters of the electorate in 2008. With Obama expected to win the lion’s share of nonwhite voters, strategists on both sides say Romney’s best hope is to reverse the decline of the white vote, or at least stall its fall.
With the economy still sluggish, Obama has little likelihood of greatly increasing his support between now and November among voters who disapprove of his performance. But by portraying his rival as an unacceptable choice, he may be able to reduce the number who turn out to vote for Romney.
Romney, for his part, doesn’t generate huge enthusiasm among voters, but has been counting all along on getting people to vote for him because they’ve decided to fire Obama.
As a result, a big part of the campaign right now is a contest to determine which man those voters dislike less. Both sides have been fairly open for months about how they planned to accomplish that goal.
Republican strategists have said they would seek to convince voters that Obama was not only an ineffective president, but a “Chicago-style politician” who had used government contracts to award his friends and donors. On Monday, Romney campaign aides said they would begin detailing those charges this week.
“President Obama has said the economy is ‘doing fine,’ ” Ed Gillespie, a senior Romney strategist, said on a morning conference call with reporters. “Well, that may be true if you are one of his contributors, but if you are a middle-class worker you are not doing fine.”
For their part, Obama advisers have said that they would seek to undermine Romney’s claim to be a “job creator” who understands how to fix the economy.
In April, a senior adviser said the campaign would remind voters of Romney’s Swiss bank account, his use of tax rules that most Americans don’t have the wherewithal to take advantage of, and Bain’s connections to firms that had sent jobs overseas.
The overall effort would be to make the case that Romney “believes in the very things that have contributed to the deflation of wages” for average Americans, the adviser said. Or, as one recent Obama advertisement encapsulated the theme, “Mitt Romney’s not the solution. He’s the problem.”
Obama aides have pointed to a couple of models, including the way California Gov. Jerry Brown defeated Meg Whitman, another wealthy corporate executive and a friend of Romney’s, in 2010. Another is the way President George W. Bush’s campaign portrayed Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004 as a rich elite who was out of touch with average Americans.
The Bain attacks further that strategy on two levels. The Obama campaign has been saying at least since January that companies Bain Capital took over had eliminated thousands of jobs. The Romney campaign’s answer has been that Bain invested in those companies after 1999, when Romney left active management to run the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.
That’s where last week’s attacks began. After the Boston Globe published an article that showed Romney had remained Bain’s chief executive for three years after the Olympics, an argument over Bain’s record quickly shifted to focus on Romney’s truthfulness. Romney’s defense as it evolved over the weekend — that he had remained chief executive but hadn’t taken an active role in management and had “retroactively resigned,” as one adviser said, in 2002 — may only have reinforced in some voters’ minds that his life and his concerns are far distant from theirs.
Romney’s campaign has accused Obama of distortions and lying, but Monday, both the president and his surrogates seemed to crank up the volume. Democratic National Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in an interview with MSNBC, compared Romney and his campaign team to toddlers, saying they need to “put their big boy and big girl pants on and defend his record.”
Obama himself, campaigning in Cincinnati on a day his opponent had no public events, amplified his campaign’s charge that Romney had been involved in sending U.S. jobs overseas by predicting he would do the same as president.
“Today we found out there’s a new study out by nonpartisan economists that says Governor Romney’s economic plan would in fact create 800,000 jobs. There’s only one problem: The jobs wouldn’t be in America,” Obama said, drawing laughter from the crowd. Romney’s tax plan, which would change how corporations calculate their taxes on income earned abroad, “would actually encourage companies to shift more of their operations to foreign tax havens,” he added.
Although polling evidence is spotty, there are some indications that voters have begun to respond to the gibes. For example, Google searches for information about Bain have jumped — a sign of interest in the topic.
In May, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed voters in tossup states closely divided when asked whether Romney’s experience in “buying and restructuring companies” was a reason to support him or a reason to oppose him. About one-fifth of voters were on either side, with a majority saying the issue didn’t matter either way.
When the pollsters asked the question again this month, slightly fewer said Romney’s experience was a reason to support him, but the share saying it was a reason to oppose him had jumped to about a third of voters.
Another gauge is the nervousness expressed by some Republican governors over the weekend.
“Romney can’t win if he’s on his heels all the time. This week’s a good example of that,” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said Sunday in an interview. “He’s got to come out, he’s got to come out swinging.”
