John McCain is putting all of his chips on Pennsylvania.

Consider that for a moment.  It displays, in plain sight, how far ahead we are right now.  Pennsylvania has not gone red in the past two decades, and here’s how the Pollster.com average looks right now:

That’s pretty steep.  So what the hell is John McCain thinking?  Well, he’s thinking this:

“There’s a tendency in Pennsylvania for the polls to change dramatically in the final days,” says John Brabender, a top Republican political consultant based in Pittsburgh. “In the governor’s race in 2002, there were polls just a few days out showing [Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell] with a 25-point lead and he ended up losing 50 of 67 counties and won by nine points.”

So it’s a combination of thinking the polls are wrong, and banking on some late movement for McCain, and if it were any other state, I would scoff and tell them to keep dreaming.  But there’s two things that bother me about Pennsylvania.  The first is the Bradley effect.  Now I know the Nate Silver has written over, and over, and over again about this, but I always felt that if the Bradley effect were to still exist, it would show up in either Michigan or Pennsylvania.  So that’s that.

The other is that Pennsylvania is critical for Obama’s electoral math.  The path of least resistance to 270 for Obama was always Kerry states + NM + IA + CO/VA.  Losing Pennsylvania throws a giant wrench into all of that, by dropping out a very critical 21 EVs.  Obama would then need to pick up either OH, FL, NV+VA, or NV+NC.  Now, none of these are impossible, or even improbable, but it definitely makes things more difficult when you have to win NM, IA, CO, NV, and VA all on the same night.

Basically what I’m trying to say is, we cannot lose Pennsylvania; therefore, we must not get complacent, especially when the competition is moving into a full court press.  I urge all of you that are close to PA to make a trip.  Remember how fun it was last time?

Tags: Barack Obama, John McCain, Pennsylvania, politics, polls

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 12:27 am and is filed under Some Pulp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.