Bias aside, who do you believe will win the 2012 presidential election?

[Tico7464]

Im a Romney supporter, but I think Obama will most likely get re-elected.

[C]

Obama

[Gee Wally]

I think Obama is a shoe in.

[john]

Barrack Obama will be the president of the united state coz of the economic growth of the U.s

[Bill Lumbergh]

Obama

[Elmer]

It depends how much election fraud takes place, and it depends on the outcome of the Supreme Court rulings that are expected in the next few weeks.

There's still a long time to November, anything can happen. It's still anybody's race.

[Lizzy]

Considering how many people are disgusted with Obama, Romney may win. But some of Romney's polices scare me. He's supporting a lot of anti-women type things. He supports Walker who wanted to take away equal pay for women. He also supports cutting the PELL grants we students rely on. To be honest, they both scare me a lot. They are both supporting things I think are truly crazy. I don't want either of them.

[Mr. Smartypants]

I think the election is Obama's to lose. Meaning that he will win unless he makes some huge mistake, or Romney comes up with some great strategy.

But I think the same thing I thought in '96 when Clinton was running for re-election. The Republicans fight hard and they fight dirty. They have almost unlimited money to spend this time around and what insufficient campaign finance laws we had are now toast. Seriously, these guys will stop at nothing! So it's going to be a very nasty election, and under the circumstances anything could happen.

[Andy F]

Too soon to tell. This one looks as if it will be very close.

I'm a democratic socialist and a fairly reluctant supporter of Obama. I hope you're right in your expectations about his victory, but I don't know .

From my admittedly biased perspective, Obama and his economic team made a horrendous mistake in 2009 by not going after unemployment far more aggressively than they did.

It wouldn't have been easy to push through a radical program to really push the US economy back towards prosperity, but I think there were maybe 2 months early in his presidency when Obama might have been able to use his immense popularity -- back then -- to pull off a miracle.

After June of 2009, though, I think he and his economic team ran into a stone wall of GOP rejection and a good deal of "moderate" Democrats defecting from the White House's message. Obama & team also chose to focus on health care reform -- a pet Democratic cause for 50 years -- rather than focusing the full force of the White House on jobs recovery.

Now Obama's paying dearly for this mistake, I think.

Another big mistake I think Obama and Co. have made is focusing their economic stimulus efforts, which were too small to begin with, on job creation by the PRIVATE sector.

Some 46% of the 2009 stimulus effort went to tax breaks for small businesses that hire new people, and most of that money was appaently wasted.

There are times when the capitalist "free market" just doesn't generate enough hiring to bring down unemployment much, and I think the last 4 years have been one of those times.

Obama, despite his terrible reputation with Republicans, actually helped the US economy enough for corporate profits at the end of 2010 to spring back tol almost $2 trillion. But for one reason or another, the big US corporations holding those $2 trillion in profits then chose not to invest much of the money in new production. Instead, they returned some of it to stockholders and kept some of it in cash.

The result is that rising corporate profits -- arguably a validation of Obama's policies -- haven't resulted in much new hiring. What Obama and the Dems should have done instead is focus on spending money to create GOVERNMENT jobs, since those were the only jobs that the government could be sure of creating.

Of course, the GOP & the media and half the Democrat Party would have accused Obama of "socialism" if he'd spent trillions of dollars on hiring new park rangers, customs inspectors, Homeland Security officers, FBI agents, federally supported teachers & social workers, and so forth.

But if the White House had actually spent money on FEDERAL or state & local government jobs -- and IF Obama could somehow bully Congress into agreeing with that -- a trillion dollars spent on job creation actually might have bought a corresponding amount of job creation.

Instead, Obama and the Dems took the "moderate" - not socialist -- path of trying to subsidize job growth indirectly, by bailing out huge banks and offfering tax breaks to private corporations for new hiring.

In too many cases, the banks and the private corporations cheerfully took the government's money, but did nothing about the jobs.

Now, unfortunately, Obama may pay for his "market friendly" and "moderate" policies by losing the fall election.

[VoteVoteVote]

All bias aside (and I mean that), I really don’t know. What I do know, though, is that many voters will not be going to the polls armed with facts. The coming corporate onslaught of lying attack ads on Obama will be hideous. It has already begun. Romney lies every day. The ads lie. When he speaks he lies. Romney’s first ad literally puts words into Obama’s mouth and is blatantly false and disgusting.

Add to all that the voter suppression laws, the purging of voter rolls, etc., and who the heck knows what will happen?