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Romney Acceptance RNC August 30 2012

Romney Acceptance RNC August 30 2012, from NBC

TAMPA, Fla. – Accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney vowed to move America past what he called the “disappointments” of President Barack Obama’s four years in office if elected to the White House in November.

In a speech that hearkened back to an America typified by Romney’s upbringing “in the middle of the century in the middle of the country,” the nominee argued he was the candidate best suited to rejuvenate a flagging economy.

Thursday was the culmination of a years-long effort by Romney to capture the nomination, a goal which had eluded his father, the former governor of Michigan. Romney unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination in 2008, and struggled during the 2012 primaries to rally the party’s core of conservatives behind his candidacy before pulling away.

This cycle’s primary – during which Romney boasted of having a “severely conservative” governing record – took its toll on him as a general-election candidate, giving fodder to Obama’s re-election team to use against the Republican during an unforgiving summer campaign.

To that end, much of the Republican National Convention this week in Florida was directed toward reposturing Romney for a general-election audience.

The GCP event was set for two hours, as has been done for previous conventions, from 10:00 to 12:00 PM local time. Romney was preceded in this period by Clint Eastwood and Marco Rubio. The result is Chisquare 7213.9 on 7200 df for p = 0.452 and Z = 0.121.

Romney Acceptance RNC August 30 2012

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.


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