Can Obama win in November? And one or two other issues...

There are quite a few threads on Obama and Hillary, but none, I believe, that really get down to the basic question of whether any political damage done to Obama has rendered him unable (or made it more difficult for him) to win a general election.

The conservatives, of course, say yes, saying he’s been seen as being all angry and such because of the “Kerry level damage” done because of the “long memories” of the white working class (a statement I haven’t quite figured out yet, myself). Hillary supporters generally agree, though perhaps for different reasons. Obama supporters think otherwise.

What are your thoughts?

Also, I read a commentator opine that if Hillary did manage to win because of late strong showings (as opposed to dirty backroom deals, as Obama supporters fear), that just might make her MORE likely to win in November than if she’d sailed in, as originally thought. After all, she’ll be seen as someone who managed to overcome overwhelming odds, not to mention the fact that if she did manage to pull it off, she’ll have shown that she outpolls Obama in important states.

Speaking of which, I started a thread a while back that was ignored, in which I quoted a pundit who pointed out that if the Democrats had a winner take all primary system, Hillary would have had the nomination in the bag right now. If true, is the fact that this ISN’T true a good thing or a bad thing?

Perhaps, but it will be tougher for him than for Clinton. The bottom line: Numbers change daily, but here are today’s:

Electoral Votes:
Obama 264 McCain 263 Ties 11
Clinton 291 McCain 236 Ties 11
(the tie is Indiana)
In states where the latest margin is less than 5%, Clinton leads 36-13 (11), Obama *trails * 99-57 (11). In the Deciding Three states from the last 2 go-arounds, Obama trails in both Ohio and Florida but leads in Pennsylvania, all by less than 5%, while Clinton leads each by at least 8%.

Obama just has no room for error, and that doesn’t even get into the Bradley/Wilder/Gantt effect (in racially-mixed states, take 5% or so off the black candidate’s poll total if he’s facing a white). It shouldn’t be that way, of course, but it is that way all the same. Yes, certainly things will change this fall, but the groundwork is being laid now and a lot of opinions are being formed now.

To pull it off, he’d have to depend on McCain self-destructing, which of course is quite possible but, given his media coverage, not to be expected.

ElvisL1ves speaks the truth. As much as people love Obama, his numbers in critical states just aren’t very good. It doesn’t make any difference in the final calculus if Obama gets more votes in places where it just makes him win by more or lose by less; what matters is whether or not it provides the margin of victory and turns a battleground state from red to blue. Presently, Clinton does that more than Obama, even though she’s less popular among people in her own party.

While that may seem counterintuitive, it’s a perfectly reasonable outcome when you have two completely different selection processes.

Having said that, assuming Obama wins the nomination, I suspect he’ll slowly erode McCain’s support. Obama is vastly more charismatic, and historically, charisma is the trait most closely associated with victory. (I guess Nixon would be the exception.) If the election were held the day after Labor Day I think McCain would win. Held in November, I suspect Obama will win, although I wouldn’t want to bet my house on it.

Now, that’s assuming electoral-vote.com is right. Their approach is pretty rigorous, but bear in mind they blew the 2004 election.

Right now McCain is coasting with no real opposition, either Obama or Hillary would easily beat him in the general.

Their approach is to list only the most recent single poll, no data-smoothing, and that jumpiness makes it error-prone. The raw data is there for anyone who wants to apply pollster.com’s weighted rolling-average approach, and anyone who cares to do so is welcome to (and it’s certainly within the electoral-vote.com guy’s capabilities). But those results can be eyeballed from their data tables, and to me the current reported results look pretty representative.

As for charisma, it has a finite life - eventually, the “Where’s the Beef?” syndrome takes hold, and there had better be some beef there or the charismatic starts to piss people off instead. The slippage in his numbers does suggest that he’s entering the back side of the charisma curve already. US voters want a backbone in their Presidents too, and it’s hard to convince us you have one once it starts to appear you might not.

As for the other OP question, I don’t think it’s meaningful - if the Dems had a different structure, their candidates would have run different campaigns, and achieved different results. Only the battleground states would have seen serious effort. Instead, with every state having serious delegate totals available even to runners-up, every state has seen a serious campaign (even MI and FL, let’s not kid ourselves), including some big ones that have never before mattered. Under the GOP’s (mostly) winner-take-all formula, which the Dems had too until recently, only the same few early states mattered.

Is that good or not? It’s good for democracy, sure, but only halfway. It would be better for democracy for the GOP to do it too. Does it put the Dems at a disadvantage otherwise? It does cost more money, and hangs out more dirty laundry, but it does get more people involved in the late-date states, and that involvement may carry through the rest of the season.

I am not really strong in math, but from what I have read, there is no chance in hell that Hillary can actually pull more delegate votes than Obama - period.

I have always said that I don’t dislike Hillary and would vote for her if she got the nomination - but I am starting to get pissed off. What exactly is she trying to prove at this point?

Once Obama gets his duly deserved nomination, I think people will start to see a few major differences between him and John McSame, oops, I mean McCain.

Obama is by far and wide the best candidate to run for President in decades. He deserves his nomination, has earned every damned vote, and will prove to the American public that there is still something called decency and hope. Not only will he win in November, but he will win with a solid mandate.

That is if Hillary will get over the fact that she has fuckin’ lost already.

Seriously, am I that bad at math?

I think there’s a pretty big difference between Obama’s campaign in, say, Maryland – where thousands of coordinated volunteers divvied up the state and went door-to-door with a simple “vote Obama” message – and his campaign in Michigan where Obama supporters would need to form shadow groups, explain the screw-up, and explain that “Uncommitted” actually meant you supported Obama (or possibly Edwards, or possibly nobody).

Call it my opinion, but I’d say that two early indicators of a “serious” campaign are that the candidate is not forbidden from campaigning, and his/her supporters are able to say their candidate’s name.

Yes. The only real question is who can beat McCain.

I’m a simple guy. My guiding principles are

  1. fiscally responsible government
  2. Rat fuck the Moral Majority

Anyone that can do that come Nov will get my vote.

This is a point I’ve raised in a couple of threads, and I think you’re on the money. Despite beliefs regarding Obama’s “duly deserved” nomination, the Dem’s process bears little resemblance to how the general election works, where all but two states are winner take all. In the primaries, with a winner-takes-all approach, Hillary wins delegates in a number that far exceeds Obama’s take, I have read as well.

Here’s what I want some unbiased analyst to do: Identify states that will go Democrat or Republican regardless of who is nominated. Sure, Hillary won California. So will Mr. Magoo if he is the Democratic nominee. Remove the solidly Republican from the mix completely.

Add up the electoral votes from each state, assigning them to the Democratic candidate who won the popular vote (not those silly-ass caucuses). Here’s the somewhat speculative part: assign the Florida and Michigan votes according to current polls, again winner takes all. Grand total, who gets the most votes? I don’t care how this maps to the nomination process–as you can see, the point is to as closely as possible, mirror the general election process. All these debates aside, we all remember that FL and MI will be voting then, right?

Yes, things can change between now and November, yadda, yadda, yadda, but this would be a nice reference point, ISTM. Take away at least some of the speculative noise regarding “electability.”

Polls ebb and flow. People are like cats, always curious about what’s on the other side of the door. Yes, Obama can win in November.

Your argument seems to be that “if the rules were different (and both candidates played the same game) then Hillary would be winning.” But Obama’s campaign has shown that they will play whichever game is placed in front of them. Obama supporters have made the caucuses a living hell for Hillary because early on, they learned the rules and play aggressively by them. Obama won more delegates in Texas because his supporters were well-informed about the bizarre (but legal!) “Two-Step” process. Hillary’s campaign, on the other hand, didn’t even file a full slate of electors in Pennsylvania. Your argument falls apart because election results are influenced by campaigning, and campaigning is influenced by the rules. You can’t assume a different ruleset and still keep the results of an election cast under earlier rules.

Why would you assign them according to a months-old election result, rather than a current poll?

I think you’ll find that a few analysts always entertain themselves making maps with various methods.

McCain.

Except that your “Yadda yadda yadda” includes

  • the Democratic Convention
  • six months of campaigning
  • the party unifying behind one or the other Democratic candidate
  • news about the economy and the Iraq War that may boost the Democrat’s chances in tough states
  • Fox News bringing out the firehose of hate
  • the Democratic candidate responding to the firehose
  • McCain disavowing the firehose
  • NYT fact-checking the firehose
  • supporters of the Democratic candidate being detained as potential terrorists on orders from political appointees at DHS*
    and of course
  • a whole bunch of unknown unknowns.

So any map you color in right now, based on any data you can gather, is still incredibly speculative and basically bogus. Primary results have never correlated especially well to success in the general; the “big states” argument from the Hillary camp is based on a correlation that isn’t there.

  • If this actually happens I want a cookie. And a new country.

Folks even Clinton thinks Obama can win in November - rememeber ‘Yes, yes, Yes’

The dems have come out in record numbers - IIRC more than in any other primary. This is the dems election to lose - and when Obama wins the nomination we will see a more united front than ever before. I cannot think of many scenerios that would prohibit the dems from backing Obama. Even if 25% of Clinton’s Dems vote for Obama we’ll nail McCain to the wall.

Do you agree that each candidate campaigned to maximize the popular vote he or she would win in each state?

I dunno, 'cause that’s the best evidence we have of how people would actually vote, given the opportunity and choices?

You’re making too much of this. The popular vote, as executed and as it would map to the GE, is certainly an interesting data point to me, and WAY more conclusive than delegates or superdelegates. Feel free to ignore this fascinating dataset when it’s compiled.

It has been pointed out again and again; primary turnouts, historically, have very little connection with the results of the election.

This Rev. Wright business, at any rate, is not going to matter by November, except in the sense that the Pubs are going to look sillier and sillier each and every time they try to do the Wright thng.

Well it is open to interpretation isn’t it? Imean if you look at strong dem versus strong republican, Obama is much better. So Obama has a much stronger eelctroal base from which to work. Now if you add in the weak dem and weak republican, that is where Hillary makes her gains on Obama. But in Obama’s column there are 99 electoral votes calssified as barely republican, compare that to Hillary who only has 17. That’s the low hanging fruit right there and there is a lot more for Obama to go after.

And none at all about the basic question of whether any political damage that will be done to Clinton will render her unable to win the general election.

Hillary has had a field day playing down and dirty dredging up peripheral crap about Obama’s “past” and “ties”, while he has left her “past” and “ties” utterly unmentioned except on her actual political record. But trust me, if she were to somehow pull off the nomination, the Republicans will have a whole hell of a lot more dirty ammunition to use against her than they have to use against Obama.

And don’t let her convince you that her scandals are all old news that somehow make her “vetted.” That doesn’t mean the Republicans will pay her the courtesy of leaving them alone like Obama has, nor does it reflect the fact that a large percentage of voters (mostly due to the fact that Obama has inspired them into the process) are young enough never to have heard of “Whitewater” or “Travelgate”, and they will be targeted with negative ads about her involvement in those scandals.

Frank Schaeffer, former evangelical Right Wing smear campaigner, has some interesting observations about what the Republicans would do to her in a general election. . .

And none of the current polls take that climate into consideration when asking voters who they’d support in the general election. People are responding based on today’s climate, not what it will become once we’re going head to head against McCain.

Here are some other numbers. Sometimes, the bottom line isn’t so clear.

EVs: (and no, I’m not totally sure what the decimal point means.)
Obama 269.1 Mccain 268.9
Clinton 256.8 Mccain 281.2

Win Percentage (probability of winning)
Obama 49.9% Mccain 50.1%
Clinton 46.8% Mccain 53.2%

Must be that they averaged several analyses together.

Another point of comparison was the 50 state match-ups performed by SurveyUSA (widely regarded as the most accurate pollster in this primary). They were done before the Rev. Wright controversy, but had Obama garnering significantly more electoral votes than Hillary.

As other posters have intimated (and as I think Elvis has conceded in the past), polls this far out are pretty meaningless. Granted, they are one of the few objective heuristics we have, but I don’t think you can make a persuasive argument with polls alone.

As to the OP, I think it is a serious minority of political observers–on both sides of the aisle–who believe that McCain is not fighting an uphill battle in the upcoming election against either Clinton or Obama. Doesn’t mean he won’t win it, but there aren’t a lot of general factors tilting in his direction.