It’s Really Over
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Rasmussen’s latest Virginia poll should put an end to any doubts about the outcome we are going to see in a couple of weeks. Obama has a 10-point overall lead in the Old Dominion, which has not voted Democratic for President since 1964. Pfotenhauer’s “real” Virginia is getting smaller all the time. His Democratic support in the state has always been much stronger than it has been in some of the old Border states, but now it is at an enviable 96%. More important, he leads among independents by 16. He enjoys a large advantage in fav ratings (64%) over McCain (53%) among independents. Obama is winning men by three and women by 15. He barely edges out McCain among married respondents, but then racks up a 39-point lead among singles. Perhaps we should call it the non-marriage gap instead.
Even 11% of Republicans and 19% of conservatives back Obama. Perhaps Ken Adelman (yes, that Ken Adelman) speaks for some of them:
Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.
That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.
What is most telling about this sizeable lead in Virginia is that Obama does not need Virginia to win. So long as he takes Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico and holds the Kerry states, he could lose every other toss-up state and still prevail. McCain must come back, in some cases very dramatically, in all of them. McCain’s task is virtually impossible. Perhaps the campaign knows and accepts this, which is why Palin was on SNL over the weekend being made to serve as something of a prop in her own mocking.
Obviously, if the voting nationwide is anything like this we can expect a result similar to that of ‘96. I will readily admit that I didn’t think this would happen as recently as six weeks ago, and kept expecting Obama to implode or lose ground, and in this I was quite wrong.
Update: CNN reports that McCain is giving up on Colorado, and New Mexico and Iowa are essentially out of reach. The campaign’s focus on Pennsylvania is, it seems to me, not nearly enough in light of the numbers from Virginia and Missouri. Even if they could win it, which seems unlikely, Pennsylvania wouldn’t get them enough votes on its own unless they could hold all of the toss-ups.
Filed under: politics
I hold on to my belief that Virginia, if it goes to Obama, will go blue with the narrowest of margins. Webb in 2006 Senate Race won with less than 1 percent and Republican turnout has always been underestimated in the polls.
I was very pessimistic about Virginia until the past two weeks – reason being, Obama is a liberal in a very centrist state and Obama is no Warner. But Obama has visited Southwest Virginia a couple of times and he did not say boneheaded statements like the recent “Northern Virginia is not real virginia” brouhaha. So, I don’t know – anything can happen.
I just looked at the CNN report. Why, oh, why are they concentrating in Pennsylvania? I would be *extremely* surprised if Pennsylvania turned red. Either this is a brilliant move or this is the worst campaign ever run.
McCain is campaigning in Pennsylvania because he knows the Philadelphia Phillies are in the World Series. The media attention will give more exposure to the one creature able to debate Sarah Palin on her own level:
Darn it! Stupid img tags, this would have been a lot funnier if it had worked:
http://assets.espn.go.com/i/magazine/new/040922_phanatic.jpg
PA paired with OH keeps it interesting. McCain would need FL, OH, and PA. If he got those, he would probably get MO, IN, and NC. At that point, he needs either NV or NH. There is no scenario at this point where McCain wins without PA, or at least one that he has the money to execute.
Do not make assumptions. We need EVERYONE to feel that it is too close of a race and that they need to work as hard as ever to make sure that Obama wins.
Well, I agree it’s not over. I am skeptical of Virginia though mildly optimistic, think Florida, North Carolina and Ohio will go red in the end, current polling not withstanding and am nervous about Colorado. I think Penn will go blue however, whatever McCain’s campaign strategy is.
Being a pessimist, I still think McCain has a shot to steal this. He is an incredibly lucky guy who has had nine lives and Obama has been a poor closer. Elections would be probably very tight. Remember New Hampshire!
Damn, I guess I was wrong, I thought McCain would sweep the old confederacy.
The times, they really are a changing.
And McCain truly sucks at running for president.
Buh, bye.
I love all the pessimism, and normally I would not say anything against it, but let’s bear in mind that the last few weeks have seen McCain fleeing state after state and campaigning to shore up his deteriorating position in absolutely must-have states of N.C., Indiana and W. Virginia. He’s losing ground on too many fronts, he’s outgunned in advertising and out-organized, and he has the dead weight of the slumping economy dragging him down.
The deeper pessimistic argument here is not that Obama is going to lose his lead, but that things will simply get worse in the next administration after he wins.
Daniel: I also worry is that Obama could win and turn out to be terrible in office. My guess is that he’ll turn out to be pretty deliberative and decent. He could, however, turn out to be utterly ineffectual, and I think he’ll have some murderously unpopular choices to make no matter how he performs.
However, my primary worry is that someone might shoot him. That would be even worse.
McCain truly sucks at running for president.
Winner: Comment of the week!
Off topic, but can you lot help me make sense of McCain’s latest line of attack on Obama’s economic policies? It seems that McCain is now acknowledging that Obama will cut taxes for most Americans.
McCain and Palin spent most of the campaign saying that Obama cannot be trusted to cut taxes, even though he says he will. But now, it seems like McCain and Palin believe that Obama is being honest about his tax plan, but dishonest in how he labels it. (He should call it Socialism). Is that an accurate read of what’s going on?
I’ve been working on a post that addresses this, but I’m not satisfied with it yet. The short answer is that McCain is guilty of political malpractice when he attacks Obama’s tax credits, rather than, say, his health care entitlement, as socialism, and it is in any case absurd for the mortgage-bailout candidate to talk about the evils of government interference in the market or redistribution of wealth. Describing them as tax cuts is rather misleading, because no one’s tax rates are being reduced, but the end result is that taxpayers are getting money back from the government one way or another. From what I understand, how it is accounted for is mostly a question of budget gimmickry.
Technically, the tax credits will entail subsidies that will apparently be drawn from general revenues, but they seem to be designed to offset payroll taxes, which provides a sort of indirect payroll tax relief without taking the potentially politically dangerous position of actually reducing payroll taxes. So this will mean that the government is paying out more than it currently does, and it is not, strictly speaking, a reduction in anyone’s actual tax rates, but basically McCain has put himself in the idiotic and unpopular position of denouncing government payments to low and middle-income families while supporting bailouts of financial institutions. Oh, yes, I forgot–he stands up for the average Joe.
I think that campaigning on reducing payroll taxes would be enormously popular with employers and employees alike, but it would open up the perilous question of what to do with Social Security. It seems to me that campaigning against a regressive tax would be a winner from both small-government conservative and progressive perspectives, and it would help advance arguments for SS and entitlement reform. McCain hasn’t the wit or the imagination to do this, and so he is in the uneviable position of providing next to nothing in the way of tax relief for low and middle-income voters.
Daniel- Thanks for your response and explanation. I’m looking forward to your post on the subject.
I’m sure that McCain thought his tax plan and arguments would be simple and easy to digest when he first formulated them at the start of his campaign. And maybe they were, initially. His harebrained response to the financial crisis really undercut any chance he had of making a coherent closing argument on taxes, or anything else relating to the economy. So he is now stuck pivoting off of Joe the Plumber and calling Obama a socialist.
Good to see you are graciously admitting your mistakes. I too may have made some mistakes, in that I expected a close race with Obama winning by 4-5 pts, especially against McCain. Although I did leave it open that if either campaign was exceptionally good or bad, the margin would change accordingly. I think at this point it’s fair to say that Obama is running a good, steady campaign, not brilliant but well organized and thought through (with a potentially devastating ground game in close contests). The surprise has been how utterly atrocious McCain has been, from the very first speech he gave after Obama won the Democratic nomination, with that awful green screen backdrop. He’s had a few decent weeks here and there, but this has got to be disappointing to everyone in the GOP who settled on McCain as the Republican with the best chance of beating the Dems in this environment. I thought the whole poin of nominating McCain is getting someone who will run a decent, honorable campaign and get lots of independents and right-leaning Dems to go for him. If the strategy was to go for the red meat and McCarthyism, why nominate McCain, who just doesn’t do it very well, he’s clumsy as an ox at this sort of thing. Wouldn’t Romney have been a better pick for this kind of Rovian campaign? Even Guiliani. Hard to imagine it having come out any worse, in that we may be heading towards blowout-land.
As for the redneck/racist factor in Pennsylvania and that general region, it appears not to be doing for McCain what it did for Hillary. It seems that many are following the lead of that guy talked about on 538.com, who tells the canvasser, “We’re votin’ for the nigger.”