Bad news from Georgia: McCain 46, Obama 44, Barr 2, Nader 2. Link: (warning, PDF) here.
Looking at that survey, a number of things jump out at me:
With two third-party candidates, Obama does better.
Jim Martin also has a real chance of winning.
Especially if there’s a last minute swing, since he has 30% of Chambliss supporters who might possibly vote for him, and Chambliss has 25% of Martin’s supporters possibly voting for him.
The AA percentage is a bit low: 26% in the survey, but Georgia is 30-31% black.
If McCain is this close in Georgia, he’s pretty much fucked. There aren’t very many states that have a stronger record the past few years of voting Republican.
There are multiple states that McCain needs on his possible path. Using the RCP map (which is somewhat generous to McCain if anything), McCain needs VA, all the eight they call toss-ups, and to pick off another Obama lean like NM. All of those are critical. Every one.
But hey, this is right where he wants Team Obama! He said so!
Right, but the polls in Virginia close at 7 pm Eastern time, one of the earliest to close. It’s possible that it will be called for Obama soon after if he’s way ahead. If that happens then McCain has no chance, and the election will be over right away. It’s in that sense that Virginia is critical.
Is there anywhere to find a list or map with all the closing times on it. I plan on drinking heavily, either in celebration or to dull the pain, and want to be prepared.
According to this post, McCain’s people are giving up on Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico, and hoping they can win by taking Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
They’ve just dropped just about every state they can afford to lose. If they lose the states they gave up, then they must win Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania or else they’re forked.
Virginia and Pennsylvania are both strongly Obama, and I’m sure McCain won’t get some of those others either. It’s not that long ago that Colorado was supposed to be a battleground and a test for Obama’s strategy. Now with two weeks left, McCain is admitting there’s no way he can get it, or Iowa either. And Obama’s campaign has a ton of money to spend in the last days.
Giving up Colorado is insane. It doesn’t make any sense. Colorado is closer, and much more winnable, than Pennsylvania.
It goes without saying that McCain must hold FL, NV, NC, VA and Ohio from the Bush ledger; if he doesn’t, there’s no realistic scenario in which he wins. But taking PA will be ludicrously hard. Obama has a huge lead there. RCP, the allegedly Bush-leaning site, has him up by 11.7.
McCain can still win if he holds Bush’s states AND loses New Mexico and Iowa. Colorado seems to me to be a winnable state for him; Obama’s lead is not big and has been shaky at times, and it’s a haven for fundamentalists. I don’t understand why they would waste resources on Pennsylvania and surrender Colorado. They can win CO; they won’t win Pennsylvania unless Barack Obama shows up at the World Series and pisses on a Pennsylvania flag in center field.
Of course, according to RCP, Obama is leading Virginia by eight points, which is an epic fail and he should be pouring effort into that state too. But shit, not Pennsylvania. It’s crazy to expend dollars to lose there that could be spent to win Colorado. He’s begging to lose. At this point his winning play is “Hold all Bush states except Iowa and New Mexico.” He needs to pour everything he can into Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida, and pray that momentum and history will give him some of the other close ones like Indiana and Missouri.
I don’t know how fivethirtyeight does its calculations, but they give McCain very little chance in most of those states. They give him an eight percent shot at Virginia, 10 percent in Colorado, 25 percent in Nevada and Florida, 28 percent in Ohio and 38 percent in North Carolina. Even if McCain’s campaign redirects some resources it sounds more likely he’ll LOSE all those states rather than win them.
Giving up on Colorado makes some sense because it’s in the West. What’s going on is that there is a critical mass of votes on the East Coast. If Obama takes the entire Eastern Seaboard, he’s essentially won, and it will be very hard for the news stations not to call it for him. This means that people won’t go out to vote out west.
Iowa practically launched Obama’s presidental run. They made him into an overnight favorite in a lot of people’s eyes when he came in 1st and Clinton 3rd. I’m not in Iowa but I always thought that they probably feel a vested interest in the guy. McCain never stood a chance in the state.
So, with that said, whoever the political genius was who kept sending McCain to Iowa and spending money on ads there… I want to shake his hand and thank him for every dollar and day that didn’t go towards Ohio, Virginia and Florida.
According to the article, CNN and Reuters themselves also participated in the poll. Wouldn’t that counter a lot of whatever Zogby does that makes them so “offensive” in their methodology?
(This is not just to you, but to the others that commented with something similar.)
And this is what’s going to blow it for the Obama campaign, if they don’t buckle down on the “Get Out The Vote” efforts on Election Day. If early polling numbers show Obama winning by, like, forty gazillion percentage points, then supporters in states like ours may say “screw it” and stay home. Especially since Colorado was recently listed as one of the states least ready for the election, in terms of planning and voter registration issues, and since the Colorado ballot is so. damn. long this year.
I don’t see why you figure that Obama supporters are more likely to stay home in such a scenario than McCain supporters. Or why you would think that the Obama campaign would suddenly decide that the morning of Nov. 4th is a great time to stop buckling down.
But even allowing for those two, if Obama is killing it on the East Coast, winning all the expected states, plus PA, VA, FL, OH, MI, and NC, that gives him 209 EVs. No matter how complacent his supporters are, he’s still going to win CA, IL, and HI, which will guarantee him 80 more, even without CO, NM, NV, IA, MN, WI, OR and WA. Basically, if he is absolutely crushing McCain in the East, and his Western supporters get really, really, unbelievably complacent, there’s still not enough votes to keep McCain afloat.
Most likely, though, either OH or FL (or both) will be too close to call for a good long time into the evening. And if they’re called early for Obama, he’s probably on his way to a landslide. If they’re called early for McCain, the race is still competitive heading westward.
