Reports of the Republican nominee's doom are greatly exaggerated

2. Republicans Will Unite Behind Romney (or Whomever). Here’s the sort of sentence you can find in articles on nearly every presidential poll, with the numbers fluctuating slightly: “Still, 52 percent … say they are not satisfied with the candidates running and wish someone else would enter the race. And that level of dissatisfaction is up from the 45 percent who felt that way a few weeks ago.” But that sentence actually comes from a March 3, 1992 New York Times story on the Democratic primary. Unfortunately for those Democrats, no white knight rode in (damn you, Mario Cuomo!) and they were stuck with lesser candidate Bill Clinton, who went on to be the most successful Democratic president since Truman. In a January 30 Pew poll, Republicans gave almost exactly the same responses: 52 percent were dissatisfied with their slate, up from 46 a few weeks earlier.

None of this is to say that the primary process hasn’t been very bad for the Republican Party. It has. Nor is it providing the sort of improvement that the 2008 race did for Barack Obama, as party pollyannas would have you believe. In particular, Romney (assuming he holds on to front-runner status and wins the nomination) has a bad, and worsening, favorable/unfavorable ratio. But the party will coalesce behind him, or whoever gets the nomination, though it’s hard to see who else that could be at this point. Returning to the Clinton comparison, the Arkansan’s favorability was nearly as far underwater in April 1992 Gallup polling (34 favorable, 46 unfavorable) as Romney’s is now, but he still won…

7. An October (or September, or August) Surprise. The Obama Administration is overdue for a major scandal (despite the best efforts of congressional Republicans, neither Fast and Furious nor Solyndra seems to have had a major impact on public opinion). Israel could decide to attack Iran, forcing the president into a Sophie’s Choice of either entering a catastrophic war in the Middle East or else rebuking Israel in an election years. Who knows what else might happen?