Of course he can, I know that anything’s possible, especially with the Electoral College, but is there a plausible path to do so?
I don’t really understand polling on a sophisticated level, but I think I understand the principle that says if McCain takes a nationwide lead in polls due to racking up huge support in states with few electoral votes but Obama is narrowly ahead in battleground states, Obama can still pull out a win.
Obama seems to be very sharp on exactly this tactic, to judge from how he wrested the democratic nomination away from Hillary–essentially, by mastering the rules of the nomination process, maximizing an advantage in the caucus states where Hillary hadn’t built a strong organization–so I’m wondering if he has a plan in place in the event that Western states swing to the McCain/Palin ticket.
Of course, it gets harder, in that with a huge lead in Western states, McCain no longer will need to burn his resources to campaign there, and so can invest in battleground-states media buys-- but would this make or break the election? I keep reading (but not really understanding) how Obama’s relatively small lead in the polls is deceptively large in terms of the electoral vote, but can this hold up, more narrowly, if his nationwide poll numbers go down, even to the point of losing in the national polls? How low can Obama’s poll numbers go before the election necessarily swings to McCain?
I know it’s early, but right now Obama has a comfortable lead in the electoral college. These two sites, which categorize states as either strong, leaning, or toss-ups show Obama to have either a 238 to 185 lead or 260 to 179 lead (271 needed to win) when solid and leaning states are considered. Obama only needs a small percentage of the toss-ups to become president. In other words, this Obama supporter is for the moment quite sure that the question of McCain’s popular vote/electoral college count is irrelevant. He ain’t gonna win!
Was Bush ever ahead in the polls for more than a day or two, either election? Remember the pretty blue and red map that showed that Kerry was going to win by a healthy margin? It showed that even on election day…
Neither the nationwide polling nor the electoral charts showed Kerry as a clear winner in 2004. I’m not sure where this idea came from that “all the polls said Kerry would win” in 2004.
Was Bush ever trailing in IN or tied in VA, ND, or MT? These were rib-rocked red states in 2000 and 2004; Bush won them all both times. Did his opponent ever have double-digit leads in IA or NM? Bush won these battleground states, but today they appear to be in the bag for Obama. With the possible exception of NH, can you name a single state Kerry garnered in 2004 that Barack Obama has been trailing in since the primaries ended?
If Obama wins any of IN, VA, OH, FL, NV, CO, or NC and keeps the Kerry states, he wins the election; all of these are battleground states. With the exception of NV, he can win any of these and win even with the loss of NH. And if he’s in a position to pick off the upper Plains/Rockies, McCain is facing a potential rout.
Probably not. The obvious way for the scenario is for a candidate to barely win the states he wins, and lose the states he loses massively.
Obama’s fifty state strategy means there are very few states where he’ll lose massively.
Plus, it’s always harder for a Democrat to win that way. Democrats tend to win big states population-wise, who are under-represented by electoral votes. Republicans tend to win smaller states, which are over-represented by electoral votes.
I’d be confident in an Obama win even if the polls were reversed right now. Obama is running one of the best campaigns in history, he is magnitudes better organized than McCain and has lots more people playing the ground game. Not to mention people are a lot more enthusiastic about him than they are about McCain. Kerry was ahead in the polls and still lost, thats because he ran a horrible campaign and people weren’t enthusiastic about him at all, McCain is this years Kerry so even if he was ahead in the polls i wouldn’t be surprised at all if he ended up losing.
You are assuming the polls are accurate. It is rare to find 2 that agree.
The pollsters call land lines. That distorts the poll and limits the pool. That is no longer viable to get a thorough result.
pollsters.com does seem “off” in relation to other polls I’ve seen. The Real Clear Politics polls is an average of polls and should be much more accurate.
That’s how I see it too, all in all, but I don’t think it’ll be a rout. There are still quite a few people who wouldn’t tell a pollster they won’t, under any circumstances, vote for a black candidate (just ask Andrew Young or Tom Bradley). I’m cautiously optimistic, and the Electoral College math is looking good for Obama right now, but two months is an eternity in politics. It’s still a long time until the election.
To answer the OP, yes, of course. But it’s not a position he’ll want to be in. Hang onto a slim lead, if he can, and then blow 'em out of the water in the Electoral College.
All the maps I’ve seen have Obama clearly ahead in CA, WA, OR, and NM. McCain leads in UT, WY, AZ, and ID. MT and NV are tossups, and CO leans to Obama. If anyone has a huge lead in the West, it’s Obama.
I don’t dispute that for a second. But the current buzz is that Palin’s strength is in the West, and if that trend proves accurate over the next few months, we have a whole new ballgame. If her nomination brings Montana and Nevada back to McCain, and Colorado shifts red, that might hurt Obama badly. This small-town girl stuff has a certain appeal–we know her, we trust her, bbb.
Palin might be comparatively more well known in the West (Pacific and Mountain) than in the East, but I really doubt anyone in MT/NV/CO have heard much if anything about the works of Gov. Sarah Palin prior to her inclusion in the GOP VP short-list. AK might be in the same geographic category as other western states, but it’s really quite far removed from the public’s awareness down here.
Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 <– Nov 2. Even this one the day of the election still shows Kerry ahead, though the margin shrank to almost nothing in the face of reality.
Edit: Oh, sorry, the latter is stillbeing used as a reference here. I shouldn’t have just limited posts to a year or older when I searched for www.electoral-vote.com
Just from informal surveys among people I know, a significant number under 35 do not have a landline or if they do, they do not use it. I therefore believe Obama’s actually farther ahead than polls show him to be right now.
As someone observed above, polling seems to be getting less accurate these days because they aren’t keeping up with changing communications–somewhat akin to the “Dewey wins!” situation in '48.
There’s also the fact that Obama’s ground game and get-out-the-vote effort is much more massive than in '04 or '00, and the demographics that will be gotten out tend to be under-represented in the polls.
Then there’s that fickle youth vote that historically turns out at about 10% of its numbers. Obama has a huge lead there, and Kerry actually did make an effort that paid off, getting 15% of them to vote. Since pollsters habitually undercount that demographic because of its historically poor turnout, a good turnout for Obama won’t show up in the polls beforehand.
So, there are lots of plausible ways for Obama to win while trailing McCain in the polls beyond the margin of error, largely because the polls will have been wrong. On the assumption that the polls are correct, it all depends upon how the electoral college shakes out.
The one thing Obama has going against him is the number of people who privately are against voting in a black president. I wouldn’t be surprised of a 7 point difference between the final polls and election results.