1.9%?!?!?  That’s a little ridiculous…

Here’s a little supplement to my previous post.  The McCain campaign has made it very clear that victory runs through PA.  So in the spirit of understanding their thought process I used DailyKos’s beta version of their electoral scoreboard, which looks like it’s going to be really sweet come Tuesday.  Here it is:

I made this by flipping PA red, and then sequentially flipping states in order of their Pollster.com averages until McCain hit 270.  Here’s the list of states and their margins, that McCain has to win on Tuesday in order to be successful withe his PA strategy:  MT (M +3.3), GA (M +2.2), IN (M +0.6), NC (O +1.8), MO (O +1.9), FL (O +2.7), ND (O +3.1), NV (O +5.9), OH (O +6.3), PA (O +9.3).

That’s a full blown sweep of the current toss-up states, as well as what would be a few surprising pick-ups in NV and OH.  But the most surprising element of all would be the keystone (haha) of this entire strategy: PA.

McCain has not led there pretty much ever. And the trend is by no means moving swiftly enough in his direction. Let’s call this what it is: a hail mary.

I’m not talking about their lack of reporters, statisticians, pundits, or fancy touch-screen graphics.  I’m talking about the very real possibility of a landslide on Tuesday.  I like to spend a little bit of time on the weekends watching cable news, just to catch a whiff of the narrative.  And the narrative these days is, “What the heck is Obama doing campaigning in all these red states, and even running ads in Arizona, when this election is so close?”  Y’all already know the answer to this, because your jobs don’t depend on the fact that people remained interested in the horse race.  But just to recap, here’s where we are:

Fivethirtyeight

Pollster.com

RCP

John McCain has very real problems.  Barack Obama’s fivethirtyeight landslide percentage (>375 EV) is currently at 38.5%.  So basically, the only argument you could make in order to convince someone that this race is close is if the polls in a large portion of the United States are completely and utterly wrong, which does have a small possibility of being right.  But then you throw this into the mix:

These ground campaigns do not bear any relationship to one another. One side has something in the neighborhood of five million volunteers all assigned to very clear and specific pieces of the operation, and the other seems to have something like a thousand volunteers scattered throughout the country. Jon Tester’s 2006 Senate race in Montana had more volunteers — by a mile — than John McCain’s 2006 presidential campaign.

And then there’s this:

** In NV,  43% of Democrats who have voted early are new or sporadic voting Democrats

** In NC, 19% of Democrats who’ve voted early are Democrats who’ve never voted in a presidential election before

** Says Plouffe: “We are going much better with Hispanic voters in Florida than certainly was the case in 2004 and we believe in 2000. Puerto Rican voters, Columbian voters, and doing surprisinglky well with younger Cuban voters.”

** “In Florida, a quarter of sporadic voting Democrats are turning out out that the same rate as very likely Democrats.”

Democrats are currently outnumbering Republicans in early voting in Florida by 250,000 votes.  In 2004, early voting in Florida ended with a 40,000 vote Republican advantage.  Democrats are also banking a solid majority of votes in Washoe county in Nevada, a county that voted Bush in 2004.

And finally, a little perspective for good measure:

I know it’s a little scary to be a Democrat and actually be winning, and I’m also aware of the track record we have as a party to blow it in the end.  But I have to say, the evidence is overwhelming.  Now, this doesn’t mean we should just sit back and not do anything and coast across the line, but I just want y’all to be prepared for the party on November 4th.  It’s gonna be rockin’.

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?

Nate says:

I’m short on time today, so let’s keep this on point: John McCain is in deep trouble. In spite of some incremental gains that McCain has made in some of the national tracking polls, the set of state polling that follows is so strong for Obama that he continues to hit record marks in all three of our projection metrics. We are now projecting Obama to win the election 90.5 percent of the time, with an average of 346.8 electoral votes, and a 5.4-point margin in the national popular vote.

Just 27 days to go…

From Politico:

John McCain is pulling out of Michigan, according to two Republicans, a stunning move a month away from Election Day that indicates the difficulty Republicans are having in finding blue states to put in play.

McCain will go off TV in Michigan, stop dropping mail there and send most of his staff to more competitive states, including Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida. Wisconsin went for Kerry in 2004, Ohio and Florida for Bush.

McCain’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

(more…)

From a new Pew report:

In each of the surveys, there were only small, and not statistically significant, differences between presidential horserace estimates based on the combined interviews and estimates based on the landline surveys only. Yet a virtually identical pattern is seen across all three surveys: In each case, including cell phone interviews resulted in slightly more support for Obama and slightly less for McCain, a consistent difference of two-to-three points in the margin.

Here’s the data:

Just to recap, what was Nate’s conclusion?  2-3 points.

[Via Ambinder]

Details at 538.

This was actually a pretty dramatic shift.  Details at 538.

There’s something that continues to bother me about the national polls, especially the most recent ones: the National Security credibility gap. In all of the polls so far, McCain is always favored by large majorities as the person most qualified to be Commander-in-Chief, or has a better handle on national security issues. Here’s an example, from the most recent CBS/NYT poll:

The reason this bothers me is that, from my viewpoint, the events of the last 2 months couldn’t have made it any clearer that Barack Obama would be more effective than John McCain as Commander-in-Chief.  Remember when this was a gaffe?

Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination, said he would order strikes on Al Qaeda targets and withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid if the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, did not blunt a resurging Taliban presence in the country’s tribal areas. This, he said, is the “right battlefield” to make the United States safer.

“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act,” Mr. Obama said, “we will.”

John McCain even jumped in at the time to comment:

McCain “said Sen. Barack Obama’s threat to use military force to get rid of terrorists in Pakistan shows he does not understand the complexities of the region. McCain said the situation in Pakistan is ‘very delicate,’ since the country’s leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is an American ally with a tenuous hold on power. The Arizona senator said a direct American attack on the country could cause a backlash that might topple Musharraf.”

And what did we learn today?

President George W Bush secretly ordered US special forces to conduct ground assaults in Pakistan without the approval of the Pakistan government.

Obama led. Bush followed. McCain was wrong.

And this isn’t the only event that fits this mold.  Sullivan sums them up nicely:

On one of the most critical decisions of the war, Obama staked out a position a while back that the Bush camp and neocons assailed as naive, disastrous, and revealing of his unfitness to be president. But like almost everything else Obama has said about the war, he was right and Bush was wrong. Obama was ahead of Bush in proposing to shift troops to Afghanistan, ahead of Bush in suggesting a timetable for Iraq withdrawal (subsequently embraced by Maliki), ahead of Bush in arguing we should talk directly to Iran, and, of course, right about not fighting the war in the first place.

The Bush administration – when guided by the saner forces within it such as Gates and Rice – eventually follows Obama’s advice. In that sense, Obama has been president for quite a while already. And proving he could be a shrewd, pragmatic and prescient one.

Obama led.  Bush followed.  McCain was wrong.  This needs to get blasted out with a megaphone, because until people know this, they fall back on the conventional wisdom that Republican’s are stronger on defense because they say stuff like “Islamofascists” and thump their chests when they talk about Russia.  Basically, we need more of this:

The Obama Campaign cannot do what so many Democrats have failed to do in the past: try to out-macho the Macho Party.  They need to challenge the judgment of McCain with sharp, tough, and dismissive comments, empahasizing who was wrong, and who was right.  This is the only way to cut through the bluster effectively.  Remember the last time the Dems tried to out-macho the GOP?

Yeah.  Let’s not do that again.

So, everyone seems to be a little worried lately about the state of the race, and I have a one word answer for y’all.  Breathe.  Something that Obama campaign has known from the very beginning is that national polls mean nothing. (Remember when Hillary was +20 in the national polls in January?)  Fortunately, we’ve all got Nate over at 538 to bring some well-needed perspective here:

McCain’s gain in our popular vote projection has been 2.1 points. Note, however, that his gains have been less than that in essentially all of the most important swing states, including Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Only Virginia is on the other side of the line, and then only barely so.

As a result of all this, the Electoral College remains too close to call, even though McCain has a 1-2 point advantage in the popular vote. Obama now has an 8.4 percent chance of winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, which is far and away the highest that this number has been all year. And that number may get larger rather than smaller, once polling filters in from other red states like Texas, Nebraska and South Carolina. Palin may have been a brilliant VP selection — I think even Palinophobes like me have to concede that right now McCain’s looking pretty savvy — but some of that sheen is taken off by her somewhat lackluster effect on the Electoral College.

Palin brought home the lackluster Republican base (namely evangelicals), which has boosted McCain’s national numbers, but has had very little effect on swing states.  Now make no mistake, this gives McCain some breathing room, but he still needs to veer left and capture the center in order to pull this thing out.

So, don’t be alarmed.  Ignore the national polls.  Watch the swing states.

(BTW – This whole thing is part of the reason I’m a huge fan of the electoral college, but that’s a post for another day.)