Its a great year to be a junkie
ANR writes:
Here’s a “what if” article about the Republican ticket. Good analysis of what they were trying to do by selecting Palin, what the results were, and whether the ticket would have been better off with Tom Ridge.
http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/10/28/what-if-ridge-were-on-the-ticket.aspx
Chris Richardson writes:
I cannot get over how different the two campaigns are in the final week of the race.
Look at Obama: he is re-articulating the main points and themes of his entire campaign. The “Are you better off/will you be better off?” ad. He appears composed, confident but not cocky.
And McCain? Hard to tell what he’s saying because most of the noise from the GOP side of the field is stemming from infighting within the party. The off-script controversy involving Palin could not be coming at a worse time. And maybe, just maybe, it would have flown a bit more under the radar had McCain campaign officials not thrown coals on the fire by giving anonymous quotes to the press confirming that there was indeed bad blood within the campaign between McCain’s people and Palin’s people.
By confirming the fued, McCain’s people have projected two of the worst images a campaign can have: a lack of leadership and a lack of organization. The fact that this is all going down eight days before the vote makes it even worse.
At the end of last week with Obama off the trail for a couple of days, I thought McCain had a golden opportunity to make up a lot of ground. He was the only game in town. Obama surrogates were still carrying out his message, but the lack of visibility for Obama himself gave McCain a couple of days to increase his presence, so to speak. By the end of the weekend, though, the stories of in-fighting had come out. McCain’s opportunity was lost.
IMO, the McCain campaign has 2-3 days to put out these fires. If, by the end of this week, we are still hearing as much about the cost of Palin’s wardrobe as we are the cost of McCain’s economic plan, I don’t think there is enough time to recover.
Tags: closing articles, in-fighting, McCain, Obama, Palin, Republican
I am in DC today with Year up, put heard on Potus 08 on the way to the airport that if McCain takes all of the swing states and PA, that would put him over 270 Electoral Votes.
Also this from Zogby:
Pollster John Zogby: “McCain is well within striking distance in each of the six states in which he trails. None of Obama’s leads are outside the margin of error. However, unless McCain can take one of the big states won by John Kerry in 2004, such as Pennsylvania, he needs to win these six states. He might be able to survive the loss of Nevada, but probably not any of the others.”
Tags: McCain math, Zogby
I have been a fan of David Gergen since he joined the Clinton administration, not because I was a fan of Clinton (because at the time I wasn’t), but because I admired his bi-partisan commitment to serve the presidency. I now find him by far the most balanced (maybe in a set of one) and insightful of all the talking heads on CNN.
Last night, he made an excellent point about Obama missing the most obvious rebuttal to McCain’s socialist charges. To paraphrase Gergen:
Giving money to low income wage earners is nothing new. The program where if you work, but do not make enough money to pay taxes and the government gives you money, is called the “earned income tax credit,” and it was started by Ronald Reagan.
Again, where’s the ad?
John Della Volpe, the founder of Social Sphere Strategies and Director of Polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, sent me an email yesterday with permission to quote him:
Obama is doing 3x as well as Kerry among millennials. Also winning every other major subgroup. This has been way over for weeks now.
John has over 20 years experience in polling and marketing research and has been running the IOP’s poll of 18-24 year olds for the past 8 years. The IOP just released their Fall 2008 Youth Survey on Politics and Public Service last Wednesday. Click here to read John’s power point presentation. Here’s a sample of what you’ll find:
Tags: IOP, Obama, youth vote
As a follow up to “6 Reasons Obama could lose”, I have been looking at a few data sets that support an Obama win.
1. The youth vote could be huge
Last year, while helping John Della Volpe, the Director of Polling for Harvard’s Institute of Politics, start Social Sphere Strategies, we analyzed the potential of the youth vote to have a major impact on this election. We found that the number of potential new voters (registered and did not vote + eligible to register) aged 18-28 were over 50% greater than those over over the age of 60. 19 million aged 18-28 vs. only 12MM aged 61-106. The number of potential voters who did not vote aged 18-28 was greater than all the potential voters (voted + did not vote) aged 61- 69.
Everyone knows Obama has done a very effective job of registering and getting college students to vote absentee early. They could make the difference in this election.
2. New Democratic registrations out number new Republicans by as much as 4:1
In all key battle ground states, the number of new Democrats + new Independent voter registrations are greater than the number of new Republican registrations. And in Ohio and Nevada the number of new Democrats and Independents, net of new Republicans, significantly exceeds the Bush 2004 margin. In other words, If only those who voted in the last election and those who have registered new for this year vote and all of the new Republicans vote for McCain while the new Democrats and Independents all vote for Obama, Obama would win Nevada by 6% and Ohio by 3%. These two states would be enough to secure an Obama victory. For super nerds, here’s part of the data:
3. In the major battleground states with contested Senate races, the Democrats are well ahead in the polls (if this is hard to read on your computer, Presidential race is on the left; Senatorial on the right; the order is Virginia, NC, NH, Colorado):
Check out the mirror images from North Carolina where Republican Senator Libby Dole is now running behind after having a comfortable lead in the polls through August. This shows more than a movement to Obama and away from McCain; Democrats across the board are benefiting from the impact of the financial crisis.
As an interesting aside, these comparisons should give us good data post election for measuring any so-called “racial leakage.”
ANR writes:
After celebrating WVU’s football victory until 2 am, I got up at 7 and returned to Charleston for the Biden Rally. I was on the risers behind Biden – if you look closely, you’ll seem me sometimes over his shoulders.
He hit hard on his working class credentials, the need to revive a middle class, the importance of veterans and patriotism in West Virginia, and an energy policy that includes investments in carbon controls to make clean coal technology a meaningful part of freeing our dependence on foreign oil. He blasted the McCain ticket on robo calls, energy policy, ties to Bush, and many other areas. He pointed out how Senator Byrd came to his wife’s funeral days after they had met, and how Jay Rockefeller is one of the most respected voices in Washington (by both parties) on Foreign Intelligence. The speech was 1/2 hour, and he mingled close to an hour afterward. The concluding music was “Signed, Sealed, Delivered – I’m Yours.”
One of the reports said “several hundred” but I had a great vantage point and felt there were 1500-2000 people there. It was at 10:30 on a workday with chilly, dreary weather.
Speakers included Senator Byrd, Senator Rockefeller, and Governor Manchin. Senator Rockefeller said he had his own, deep poll done on the Presidential Race in WV. His pollster is Guerin/Hart and they have steered him right for his entire political career. He says McCain leads in WV by 1%.
Here’s what Pollster.com says:
Very interesting;
Slate has:
Obama 286
McCain 157
Electoral-Vote has:
Obama 337
McCain 171
How Obama could still lose:
1. Although unlikely, he could stumble badly. E.g. another “cling to” comment is made or surfaces.
2. His surrogates or advisers could make a “bone-headed” statement. I will never forget hearing on CNN the Friday before the 2004 election that Theresa Hines Kerry picked the lock box she had been placed in for most of the campaign and said publicly “I don’t think Laura Bush has ever had a real job”. I emailed Patty, “its over.”
Murtha came close yesterday saying his constituents were “rednecks.”
3. Overconfidence. The poll that counts are the ones tallied at the end of the day on November 4th. I have heard so many people say “there’s no way he won’t win Ohio,” when the polls say different (see below). Also, I have seen actual votes on election day be as much as 9% off of the last poll taken.
4. Osama Bin Laden makes a cameo appearance the Friday before the election. This happened in 2004 and some credit it with pushing the election to Bush. It is one of the reasons I felt Wes Clark or Jim Webb would have been better VP choices for Obama. The Colin Powell endorsement and McCain’s erratic behavior somewhat mitigates his advantage here, but for enough voters in a few big states, this could still be a game changer.
5. The typical trend is for undecideds to follow the latest polls. In most, if not all, competitive primaries, the undecideds did not break for Obama.
6. The McCain “socialist,” “spread the wealth around,” “why should I work harder just to pay more taxes,” etc. ads may actually be working. Slate reports today that recent polls show a trend towards McCain in Ohio, Indiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina and Virginia. Here are a few graphs to illustrate that point. Although the West Virginia one clearly has a flawed data point when Obama was up by 8 points, I do think this is somewhat accurate in that the undecideds in some states have not been terribly engaged or educated and are susceptable to these kind of arguments. I have been surprised by the number of “man on the street interviews” I do (e.g. if I have a customer service rep on the phone from a swing state, I always ask them who is going to win) where people say “I don’t like either one of them.”
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