White House race is still Obama’s to lose

There is now just a month to go to the US presidential election and what a month it promises to be.

The opinion polls at the moment are suggesting that Barack Obama will emerge victorious, but as we know in electoral contests, much comes down to what happens in the final month of the campaign.

A number of factors will be crucial to the outturn at this relatively late stage. The key ones must include the performance of the candidates themselves, the performance of the economy and particularly the labour market, and the voter turnout on the day, particularly given the campaign by the Republican Party to discourage certain legal aliens by insisting on more rigid identification procedures at the polling booths, despite the fact that they are entitled to be in the US and to vote.

In relation to the performance of the candidates themselves, there are three presidential debates scheduled. The debate on Wednesday night of this week concentrated on domestic policy and Mitt Romney was declared the winner by most polls and commentators; the second is on Oct 16 and will be a town hall meeting format where the audience will pose questions on domestic and foreign policy issues; and the final debate will take place on Oct 22 and will concentrate on foreign policy issues.

The general view in the US was that Obama would perform better in the three debates given his oratorical skills, and given the fact that Mitt Romney is less comfortable communicating his message to the public at large. But it was Romney who came out on top on Wednesday night.

The liberal media and public has tended to ridicule Mitt Romney, just as it did in the past to many Republicans, including Sarah Palin, both Bushes, and Ronald Reagan.

But Romney has very impressive CV — he is a graduate of Stanford and Harvard, has amassed a fortune in business consulting and private equity, has worked in France selling the Mormon message and has some very cogent views on domestic and foreign policy.

However, Romney needs to connect with the public, to have a chance of turning around the poll.

In relation to the performance of the economy, the picture is mixed for Obama. When he came into office in Jan 2009, the unemployment rate stood at 7.8% of the labour force, reached a high of 10% at the end of 2009 and is now at 8.1%.

Between Jan 2009 and Aug 2012, the economy shed just over one million non-farm jobs. However, there has been a rise every month since Oct 2010, but the increase has not matched the growth in the labour force and hence the unemployment rate remains high. In addition, economic growth since 2009, while better than in Europe, has been pretty tame.

For Obama, the good news is that over the past week, two important indices of future activity — the Institute of Supply Management’s indices of manufacturing and service sector activity — strengthened impressively. A raft of stronger numbers in the weeks ahead would certainly help the incumbent’s cause.

However, the election is still Obama’s to lose and it would take a remarkable performance by Romney to turn it around.

From Ireland’s perspective, a Romney victory would probably be of greater net benefit from a corporation tax perspective, but the implications of a victory for either would be unlikely to be too profound. Interestingly for Ireland, the IT sector in San Francisco is booming at the moment, which should be helpful to us, but a number of people I spoke to over the past couple of weeks are perplexed at the lack of a direct flight from Ireland to San Francisco or indeed to the West Coast. For a country that purports to be IT focused, this is difficult to comprehend and is not helpful in selling the country to IT investors.