Dick Morris says Obama won't win because his supporters aren't going to vote

Morris moved on to talk about African-American and Latino voters -- although not before making an odd comment that seemed to be about transgendered individuals. When discussing the breakdown of voters by gender, he said, "We know gender is 50-50, right? Well, I'm from New York, maybe not. We don't count change operations -- God-given gender."

Sam Levin

Americans for Prosperity Director Tim Phillips addressing the crowd before Morris arrived.

Morris then said interpreting polls gets more complicated when talking about race -- a touchy subject for him in the past. (A Colorado mayoral poll he offered back in the 1980s, when he supported Dale Tooley against eventual winner Federico Peña, asked the question, Would you vote for a Mexican?)

"We don't know how many African-Americans are going to vote in the election. Now, in the past, we didn't really care that much. It wasn't that important...but now, when all blacks vote one way and young people are such an important component of Obama's base, and Latinos -- we're getting a third of them, but he's getting two-thirds of them -- the important question becomes, who is actually going to vote?" he says to the crowd, which was overwhelmingly white.

He then noted that in 2008, black voters constituted 13 percent of the electorate -- which helped Obama win.

He said pollsters are using the 2008 model -- weighting black voters up to 13 percent, since it's "politically correct to do so...[and] they don't want to be accused of under-representing minorities."

The implication here, it seems, is that black voters won't be coming out in those kinds of numbers this time around, and that would hurt Obama, though Morris didn't directly say that, either.

(There's also the Herman Cain theory that the only reason polls show Romney with virtually zero support among black voters is because "they were working, so they didn't answer the phone when they took the poll.")

Morris added that "undecided voters always go against the incumbent." As we noted in our recent feature on Colorado's swing status, there are more unaffiliated voters in the state than there are registered Democrats or Republicans -- so if Morris is correct, that would certainly hurt Obama.

Morris's proof? He asked the audience to raise their hands if they were planning to remain married to the same person next year. Undecided? None.

"When you say undecided, you decided that there's something wrong with the relationship. You want a change. You just haven't gotten it together to choose somebody yet," he says.

All those pieces of the equation, he said, point to the Romney win he hopes for.

Additionally, the conventions hurt Obama and boosted Romney, he maintained. In his view, the Republican National Convention helped Romney because of the speech from Mitt's wife, Ann.

Sam Levin

Dick Morris and Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity.

"We realized that Mitt Romney is a human being. His wife got up there and said, no, he doesn't eat his dog and put him up on top of the car and go around throwing people out of work and that he's not a heartless monster," he said. "There might even be a heart inside that tin man!"

Michelle Obama did the same for Barack, he said, but no one has ever doubted the president's heart.

"He's not the tin man that doesn't have a heart," he says. "He's the scarecrow that might not have a brain."

After the event, we chatted briefly with Morris inside the tour bus, asking for more details on his arguments about minority voters.

He said that black voters simply won't be supporting Romney, but still, Obama won't win.

"I think with the African-American vote, it's a logical vote for people casting for the first of their ethnicity to be president," he said in response to a question about whether Romney can better court black voters.

"With the Latino vote, I believe that in the long run, it will behave like a traditional immigrant vote, which is, the richer it gets, the more established it gets, the better educated it gets, the more Republican it's gonna become, just like Irish and Jews and Italians and Germans all did that," he added.

Is he confident that the groups he identifies as unlikely voters actually won't show up at the polls?

"It's hard to see with....[the] unemployment rate among Latinos...and blacks...how people could be so enthusiastic about his presidency," he replied. "There's a great deal of discontent...that's sapping the enthusiasm he's going to need to get a turnout. I think he'll have a hard time getting those people out to vote."

Continue for more photos from the event and inside the bus.