The contest between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama for the presidency will end with a decisive, and possibly even a landslide, victory for Romney in November.

Polling data that hasn’t even come close to supporting this contention of mine is of no relevance.

Outside of political junkies, the rest of the electorate doesn’t begin paying attention to election races until after Labor Day.

Furthermore, Obama has heretofore outspent Romney vis-à-vis (intensely negative) campaign ads—in spite of the fact that Romney has by far and away outraised Obama in campaign donations.  Campaign finance laws preventing Romney from spending any of the monies that he has raised for the general election until after he formally becomes the Republican Party’s presidential nominee conspire to conceal this fact.  However, after the GOP convention in Tampa at the end of this month, Romney’s funds will be unleashed. 

In other words, Obama hasn’t really even gotten hit—yet.

These considerations aside, polling phenomenon depicting a razor sharp race or, more incredibly, an Obama lead, is irrelevant simply and solely because it contradicts a few basic facts that partisans of all stripes must concede.

The first of such facts is that Obama is no longer an unknown candidate.  He now has a record—a record of which everyone is painfully aware. So, even the most naïve, even the most ignorant of voters, will not fall for the same rhetoric of “hope and change” that Obama endlessly sprouted four years ago and that succeeded in mesmerizing legions of unsuspecting Americans who ecstatically consumed the notion that he was a “new” type of politician. 

That Obama himself knows this accounts for why he no longer even attempts to speak along these lines.

Secondly, the President’s approval rating has plummeted since the fall of 2008.  But it isn’t just that Obama’s numbers have fallen further and more rapidly than that of any other president.   

A much touted Pew Research Center poll from earlier in the month supports what every poll reader now knows: Obama’s favorability rating is actually below average for a presidential candidate at this time in an election season.  It states that Obama’s “current favorability ratings compare poorly with the final pre-election ratings for previous Democratic candidates.”  The poll adds: “Not since Michael Dukakis in 1988 has a Democratic candidate gone into the election with favorability ratings as low as Obama’s are today.”  

In short, Obama is not well liked.

Thirdly, it stretches credibility to the snapping point to think that everyone who voted for Obama in 2008 will vote for him this time around.

Not even close.

Blacks will vote for him, certainly, but even within this demographic, his support is not likely to be quite as high as it was four years ago.

For one, the hope shared by far too many blacks that the election of the first black president would usher in a golden age of a sort for black Americans is now exposed for the patent absurdity that it has always been.  Unemployment rates are high overall, but they have skyrocketed among blacks, and black youth in particular. 

More importantly, though, Obama’s endorsement of homosexual “marriage” promises to cost him some support among blacks—a likelihood that no less a figure than Louis Farrakhan foreshadows. 

At the end of May, at the California Convention Center in San Diego, the Nation of Islam head—a close friend of Obama’s former pastor of twenty plus years, Jeremiah Wright, and one time Obama backer—addressed an audience and noted in disgust that our 44^th president is the first occupant of the White House to sanction this practice.  Obama, Farrakhan said, is the first American president who has “sanctioned what the Scriptures forbid.”

In addition to Farrakhan, there is also the Coalition of African-American Pastors. Its members once endorsed Obama.  Now, they have publically repudiated him for taking this position.

Bill Owens asserted: “We were once proud of you, but our pride has turned to shame that you, the man holding the most powerful position in the world, would stoop to leading the country down an immoral path.”  Quinn Chapel AME’s Luke Robinson added: “His support for this un-biblical behavior will destroy even more folks in our already decaying and broken society.” Robinson declared: “His pronouncement is in fact a direct attack on the God of the bible and the Christian faith.”

But even if, from some sense of blind racial loyalty, blacks do vote for him in the same numbers as they voted for Obama in 2008, there are other groups that most certainly will not.

Take Roman Catholics, as a prime example. 

Although the media has done a splendid job of diverting the public’s attention from it, the Catholic Church has been besieged by the Obama administration.  The Affordable Health Care Act—“Obamacare”—is an unprecedented attack against both religious liberty and freedom of conscience.  Catholic clerics around the country have alerted their congregants to this. 

Catholics will not be voting for Obama in anything like their numbers in 2008.

Independents constitute another group that threw its weight behind Obama in the last election.  Precisely because, as with everyone else, independents now have a track record with which to gauge Obama, there is no way that he will garner nearly as much support among them in November.

Fourth, 2008 marked the end of George W. Bush’s second term.  As evidenced by voters’ readiness to cashier congressional Republicans in the mid-terms of ’06 and Bush’s 30% approval rating two years later, the country had GOP fatigue.

Matters are otherwise now.

The economy has gone from bad to worse during the course of Obama’s first term. And it is the economy that is voters’ top priority. Even in those polls that show Obama leading Romney, the latter consistently ranks higher in voter confidence when it comes to this most crucial of issues.

Small business owners and young adults who owe tens of thousands in student loan debt but who can’t find a job know about Obama’s abysmal handling of the economy better than anyone.

They also aren’t bound to be suckered by him again.

Fifth, when we consider that Republicans are more enthused now than they had been in a long time, Romney promises to elicit every bit as much and significantly more support than John McCain received in ’08.  From the rise of the Tea Party to the Republican tsunami of the 2010 midterm elections and the recent explosion of support for Chick-fil-A, there is no conceivable reason to deny this.

There is one final consideration that portends a sweeping Romney victory.

Congressman and former presidential contender Ron Paul has a significant and devoted following of young voters.  Their passion is second to none.  Doubtless, some of them will refuse to vote for either Romney or Obama.  But there is reason to suspect that some of them will.

Paul and Romney never showed any signs of having a strained relationship, and even though Paul hasn’t as of yet endorsed the latter, neither has he endorsed anyone else, like he did in 2008. 

Nor do I think it is likely that he will.

Ron’s son Rand, Kentucky Senator and a rising star in the Tea Party, has endorsed Romney.  Paul Sr. is retiring.  Junior is not, and the father doesn’t want to make unnecessary waves for the son.  Moreover,Rand has been allotted a speaking platform at the GOP Convention—a turn of events that can only help Romney among young Paul supporters.

Barring any unexpected revelations to the effect that Romney is a killer or a closet enslaver (Obama’s and Joe Biden’s attempts to convince us of this have thus far failed), it looks like it’s going be a clean Romney victory in November.

originally published at The New American