Watching Washington

What To Watch For In The Campaign's Wild Last Week

After the longest presidential campaign in our history, Election Day is finally in sight.

We've had plenty of "never before" stories to tell in the 21 months since the first candidate debate in the primaries, and we surely haven't seen the last turn in the road yet.

Still, the endgame of an American election usually follows a pattern, and there are certain things we can expect to see in the final frantic days.

The Narrowing Gap -- Whatever the polls may have found up to now, they are likely to change at the end to reflect the "settling" of the vote. This often means voters return to the party they usually vote for, and it often means the gap between the two candidates shrinks.

The polling gap tightened in this fashion in four of the last five presidential elections. The exception was 1992, when a three-way race broke open at the end and allowed Bill Clinton to win by about 5 percentage points.

We have seen some evidence of this settling process in recent days as John McCain adds Republican leaners to his base of 90 percent support among hard-core Republicans. While his overall number was mired down around 40 percent through much of the past month, McCain is far more likely to finish with 45 percent or more of the general election vote. And this has begun to show up in the polls, some of which even have him above 45.

By the same dynamic, some of these polls have shown Barack Obama below 50 percent in recent days, allowing McCain to come within a point or two of a tie. These have all been polls taken among 'likely voters," meaning the responses of those who have not voted before are being excluded or given less weight.

Even without a major precipitating event, it is quite possible that in the final week, one or more polls of likely voters (so defined) will show McCain in a tie or pulling ahead. But does this mean the underlying dynamic of the election has changed? Not necessarily.

The Closing Circle -- Watch for the number of states visited by the two campaigns to shrink and for the itineraries to become almost identical. This is the truest indicator of where the two camps see the race. Whatever the polls show, the contest is really about reaching 270 votes in the Electoral College, and that is done by winning individual states. As we saw in 2000, it is possible to win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College.

So watch the travel schedules. McCain will be concentrating on a triangle of states from Missouri eastward to Ohio and Pennsylvania, then south to Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. Once he has completed a circuit of these six, he'll do another. And another.

He may toss in another swing through the Western trio (Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico), and he may venture another visit to his old friends in New Hampshire. And he may want to stop off in Indiana on his way.

But he will have to stress the Big Six triangle states because he needs to win them all, and neglecting any one of them would probably mean conceding it to Obama. All but Pennsylvania are states that voted for George W. Bush twice, so McCain should find sympathetic audiences in each. But why aren't these states already in his column? That question is the clearest indication of the score in this campaign.

Proliferating Superlatives -- Candidates in endgame tend to forget the simple declaratives and comparatives in favor of the superlative -- and even the apocalyptic. This is the most important election of our lives. The challenges have never been greater. But this can still be the greatest era in American history, and our best days are still be ahead of us. Huzzah! Cue the band.

Process Anxiety -- We will see more stories about glitches and problems in the voting system, including attempts to register cartoon characters and entire rosters of football players. There will be lawsuits over attempts to purge voter rolls (as in Colorado) and over attempts to register more voters (as in Ohio).

We will hear that electronic voting machines are going to break down, or not start, or switch votes once cast. They will be accused of eradicating entire precincts of data. We will hear of stolen signs and ballots and of fliers instructing voters to vote on alternating days, one party on Tuesday and the other on Wednesday. Partisan actors on the left and right will find in these anecdotes final evidence that the other side is trying to steal the election.

No doubt many of these stories will have some basis in real issues of voting procedure, and some of the controversy will be legitimate. But much of what we hear will also be overblown, overheated and overreported.

Random Ugliness -- Fed by rumors and fear, there will be reports of confrontation, intimidation and threats of violence -- both on Election Day and beyond. This year, much of this talk will be about race. The nomination of an African-American for president is a symbol of racial progress, to be sure, but it also touches a certain nerve in the body politic that responds with resentment and worse.

We have already seen stories about troubled adolescents reacting to the political dynamic in twisted ways. These may be minor incidents at the margin of our national life, but they are a glimpse into an undeniable part of our political culture. And the final throes of a national campaign bring every aspect of that culture to light.

11:14 AM ET | 10-28-2008 | permalink

comments () | | e-mail

 

Why Can't The Presidential Polls Just Get Along?

Are you one of the people checking the Web several times a day to see how the presidential race is going? It's a lot like people watching the market fluctuations on the business channels or baseball fans sneaking peeks at the playoffs on their BlackBerrys.

If you're one of us obsessives, you probably already know the presidential race index known as the "RCP average." It refers to the average gap between Barack Obama and John McCain in the polls listed on the Web site Real Clear Politics.

Recently, that RCP average raised a lot of eyebrows by indicating that the gap in percentage points declined from 8.2 on Oct. 14 to 5.0 on Oct. 19. It even dropped below 5.0 in what you might call "intraday trading," suggesting Obama had lost nearly half his lead. Looking at the individual polls in the average, several had reduced Obama's lead from high single digits to low single digits.

Needless to say, this was a heartening trend for McCain supporters, who have not had much good news from the polls (or anywhere else) since mid-September. McCain supporters and surrogates were quick to suggest the voters were cooling on the young Democrat while the Republican's new message on taxes was resonating.

They had a feeling that Obama's "spread the wealth" comment (made impromptu to the now-famous Joe Wurzelbacher) was triggering fears of tax-and-spend Democrats swarming Washington. On Fox News, a pollster for Strategic Vision opined that "McCain was finally sounding like a Ronald Reagan conservative" in the last debate. Michael Barone wrote a column for National Review Online asking whether "Joe the Plumber" could "turn it around" for McCain.

But no sooner did this story line take hold than a new wave of polls came out this week showing Obama's lead essentially unchanged. In fresh polls taken of registered votes since the last debate, Obama was holding his lead by 11 points (Gallup Daily Tracking Poll) and 14 points (Pew Research Center).

So who's right? Could it be none of the above? All of the above?

Truth is, all these polls are legitimate and arguably correct, by their own lights. But they are describing slightly different parts of the same landscape. So you need to know a little about polling to put together the full picture.

The RCP average dropped suddenly last week for two reasons. First, the index dropped several polls that had begun their field interviews more than a week earlier. Second, the seven polls still in the index were all polls of likely voters (LVs) only. Likely voters are a smaller core within the larger world of registered voters (RVs), which is itself a subset of the total voting-age population.

The RCP ticked upward this week in part because it included a new poll of likely voters, done by ABC and The Washington Post, that pegged the Obama lead at 9 points.

Obviously, the likely versus registered argument is important.

For many years, pollsters have tried to improve their accuracy by picking the likelier voters to interview. In 2004, for example, John Kerry ran ahead of George W. Bush among registered voters in polls, but behind among likely voters. On Election Day, the likely voter number proved more predictive.

How do pollsters decide who is likely to vote? By far the best predictor of voting likelihood is voting history. If you haven't voted before, the research says you are not likely to vote this time either. Newly eligible voters and people who have never developed the voting habit are historically the least likely to vote.

Those most likely to have voted (and so most likely to vote again) are also more likely to be older than 30, better educated, better paid, married and white. So, the preferences of older, more affluent voters will be better represented among the LVs than the RVs. And on Election Day, the actual results have been closer to polls among LVs than RVs.

Will this dynamic hold in 2008?

That is the essential question underlying this election. If younger voters and people of color turn out in historic numbers, as the Obama campaign insists they will, they will not only defy history; they will change it.

And they may change the presumptions of polling as well.

In recognition of this possibility, Gallup now divides its results on likely voters into two reports. One uses the conventional definitions of voting likelihood and is called "Gallup Traditional" (rather like Coke Classic). The other allows the possibility of expanded turnout among nontraditional voting groups and is called "Gallup Expanded."

So on Oct. 18, for example, the tracking poll of RVs for the previous three days gave Obama an 8-point lead, the "Gallup Expanded" measure of LVs gave him a 4-point lead and the "Gallup Traditional" a 2-point lead.

That 2-point lead in the Traditional metric was often cited as evidence McCain was closing the gap. But three days later, all three of the Gallup measures had moved 3 or 4 points in Obama's favor.

You can check out the changing numbers in all three of these polls at the Gallup Web site.

And you can do it as many times a day as you like. See you there.

11:58 AM ET | 10-21-2008 | permalink

comments () | | e-mail

 

Why McCain Debated As He Did

In the final debate of this presidential campaign, John McCain nailed his colors to the mast. He declared his allegiance to the GOP and to the conservative movement that has dominated it for the past 30 years.

This may not have been his first choice of a strategy. And it may not be the way to the White House in this historic year, owing to circumstances beyond McCain's control and indeed beyond anyone else's.

The U.S. economy is plummeting into recession with the global economy tumbling after. President Bush is unpopular to an almost unprecedented degree and perceived as dangerously irrelevant. Ever since the mortgage mess became the financial meltdown, the advocates of deregulation and unfettered free enterprise have been in free fall. The fortunes of the GOP have followed suit.

For the moment, the economy is everything. No one is talking or thinking of the other legs of the classic conservative tripod — national security and moral values. In fact, the U.S. faces multiple crises around the world right now, and threats to traditional mores abound. But hardly anyone noticed when Connecticut became the third state to recognize same-sex marriages last week, and the topic did not come up in the final debate.

What did come up was a list of issues on which the two parties have long occupied clearly marked territory. The candidates sparred predictably over taxes and spending, spreading the wealth, providing health care, creating jobs. They disagreed about abortion and about what kind of justices the Supreme Court needs next.

The salient questions of the evening were: What will you do to restore the credit and banking systems? How will you bring the markets back? Can you fend off or at least minimize the coming recession?

With few exceptions, the candidates stuck to the scripts their parties have followed for decades. McCain advocated tax cuts for the investing class; Obama saw the country rebuilding prosperity from the bottom up. McCain blamed the problems on a greedy few and a corrupt government. Obama said there had been much too much greed and far too little oversight from Washington.

For the moment, at least, the mood of the country seems to be swinging toward the Democratic prescription. McCain knows this and touts his aisle-crossing cred. He notes he voted for Supreme Court justices who favored abortion rights. He offers to allow unemployment benefits to go untaxed in the current crisis.

But by and large, McCain's economic plans aim to refurbish investment and the private sector while restraining government. Despite a record budget deficit this year (in nominal dollars), one that could balloon to $1 trillion in the coming recession, McCain insists that "no one's taxes should be raised."

That would mean all the money for all the bailouts and rescues the government has agreed to, plus all the wars and other commitments, must come from existing or lowered taxes — and borrowing. That is the supply-side solution, to be sure.

McCain also reached for other weapons familiar from recent presidential campaigns. He attacked voter sign-ups by the community organizations known collectively as ACORN, calling them a vast scheme to defraud the voting system. In recent days he has also blamed ACORN in large measure for the mortgage meltdown because it worked to get poor people into homes. He has made basically the same argument in blaming the government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for too many low-income families' getting mortgages.

And he implied that contacts in recent years between Obama and 1960s bomber William Ayers mean Obama has something to hide about radical ties and terrorist sympathies today.

The facts in each case are, at the very least, disputable. But there is no argument among those conservative activists who consider voter fraud a major scourge and Obama an obvious liar. For weeks these elements of McCain's support have demanded that he raise these issues in the debates.

Until the last debate, McCain demurred. But in the end he had no option. A mere draw in the last round would seem to cement Obama's lead in the polls. There was no more time to await a Democratic collapse.

Will raising these matters during the debate save his campaign? The overnight polls gave little reason to think so. Indeed, some recent polling shows the Ayers and ACORN lines have hurt him at least as much as they have helped. Voters are clearly more interested in economics than in illegal registration or what McCain himself called "some old washed-up terrorist."

But to understand McCain's choice, you must remember that the conservative formula has been the way to win for several decades. The trail blazed by Barry Goldwater in defeat in 1964 and followed to success by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the Bushes has brought home Electoral College victories in seven of the last 10 presidential cycles — usually with big margins.

Whipsawed by critics who told him to "take the gloves off" one week and "fire his campaign" the next, McCain could not please his own core backers and the larger electorate at once. It was time to make a choice. Keeping the base united and excited could mean everything for statewide and down-ballot GOP candidates throughout the country. And with the current economic and political climate turning colder by the day, pleasing the larger electorate seemed less and less realistic.

So McCain chose shelter in the issues, philosophy and tactics that have powered his party since its smashing midterm victories in 1978 (halfway through Jimmy Carter's presidency) and its sweeping landslide in 1980 (the start of the Reagan era).

To follow this path once more, even under current circumstances, was the only choice McCain could realistically make.

7:22 AM ET | 10-16-2008 | permalink

comments () | | e-mail

 

Why Is McCain Campaigning Like This?

No one who has watched John McCain over much of his career can think he's happy about the campaign he's been running for president.

People who knew McCain when he represented the Navy on Capitol Hill in the 1970s, or during his 26 years in Congress or his first presidential run in 2000, do not recognize him in the caricature seen so far in the debates — much less in the brutal TV satires of those debates.

The McCain of the moment is deeply defensive about his party and his president, and just as deeply conflicted about what Republicans should do next.

One night, he tells a national TV audience he wants the federal government to spend $300 billion to buy up troubled mortgages and renegotiate them. That is a profoundly non-Republican idea that has many of his colleagues shaking their heads.

A few days later his closest friend in the Senate, Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, tells another national TV audience McCain will cut taxes on capital gains to help investors. That is surely a Republican idea, but curiously timed. Do voters feel like it's time for another tax cut for Wall Street and the major investor class?

The next day the campaign backs off the tax cuts and says it will have a new plan shortly and needs to be ready to adapt to changing circumstances. Indeed.

Let's be generous for the moment and say that changing one's mind in a crisis is hardly an original sin. Policymakers of every political stripe in every place and time have done the same. Such a highly fluid situation demands fresh thinking and flexibility.

What must be far more disturbing for McCain's longtime fans, and for the candidate himself, is the demagogic tone of his public campaign. The Arizonan may not care for Barack Obama personally, but he resents being reduced to attacking him personally. You can hear and see it in the way McCain bites off the bitter words he must say.

McCain knows his recent strategy has been about fear and suspicion and the dark side of the American psyche. He is clearly uncomfortable with it, which is why he undercut the message himself by correcting supporters who called Obama "an Arab" or wondered if they'd be safe raising a child under an Obama presidency.

Moments such as this suggest the McCain of old is still in there, somewhere. But such moments also ensnare him in a worst-of-both-worlds trap. They please neither the admirers who abhor the brawling tactics nor the backers who beg him to go after Obama hammer and tong.

These warring impulses have raged within McCain's campaign, threatening to send it off the rails. Those who have been with him longest yearn for the "Straight Talk Express" of 2000. But there are also two waves of newer arrivals, one that saved McCain from oblivion a year ago and another that brought new discipline and force to the campaign late in the spring of this year.

In better times, the factions may have coexisted and McCain may not have suffered from their competition. But since the market meltdown, the strain has been showing on all concerned.

With three weeks to go, the nationwide conservative conversation is tinged with dismay. Some are calling for McCain to demonstrate nonpartisan leadership about the economy, the foreign threats and the campaign itself. Others urge "Top Gun" Johnny Mack to blaze away, to bring the haughty Obama to earth.

The problem is that neither approach is likely to work quite the way its advocates say it will — because the current predicament of the McCain campaign is not only of its own making, nor is it under anyone's control.

A presidential campaign, like a presidency, must respond to multiple, competing constituencies. A candidate, like a president, can imagine a bold stroke of action that might alter circumstances in his favor, but executing it is another matter entirely. Campaigns are dominated by the imperatives of right now: Things to do today, this hour, this minute. Stepping back to restrategize is close to impossible.

McCain might well want to fly his own plane and chart his own course. But he is piloting something much larger now than he has before, and he is not alone in the cockpit. He must keep in mind the fate of all those depending on him, from down-ballot candidates to the GOP itself and the conservative movement writ large. Doing what he wants is a luxury he can no longer afford.

The party's hard core clamors for a rough-edged ending this fall, both to bloody Obama and to keep the rank and file on fire. Much depends on making November as competitive as possible.
McCain may not be happy about it, but many of the people behind him are not nearly as worried about winning ugly as they are about the consequences of losing badly.

7:22 AM ET | 10-14-2008 | permalink

comments () | | e-mail

 

What We (Still) Don't Know About Obama and McCain

Considering that one of these two men will soon be president, there is a great deal about their thinking that we should know and don't.

Let's allow that the second presidential debate between Sens. McCain and Obama was serious and reasonably dedicated to policy. The "town hall" format also allowed both men to move about and get face to face with individual citizen questioners, even if it did not prove as friendly to McCain as he might have hoped.

But neither the format nor the mood of the citizen questioners allowed for the full menu of issues we had been promised.

Sure, it was inevitable that economics would dominate. The country is in shock over the credit crunch and looming recession, the plunge in home and portfolio valuations.

But in their eagerness to address Issue One, NBC and Gallup chose questions and questioners fixated on it to the virtual exclusion of everything else. The only substantive news of the night occurred when McCain committed himself to buying most of the nation's troubled mortgages, a sweeping proposal he said would cost $300 billion.

That idea has been discussed in recent weeks as the crisis has worsened. The Bush administration and congressional leaders decided it was more efficient to buy up the mortgage-backed securities that have gone sour with the bursting of the real estate bubble.

Energy and health care did make cameo appearances, but primarily in the larger context of Americans' economic well-being. A question about asking Americans for sacrifice was treated as just another chance to talk about shielding us all from financial storms.

Toward the end of the 90-minute event, the subject was changed briefly to Iraq, Iran, Israel, Russia and the candidates' admitted inability to foresee the future. Then it was closing statements and good night.

Even when questioners attempted to get down to cases, the candidates nimbly eluded their grasp. For his part, moderator Tom Brokaw of NBC proved unwilling to enforce the questioner's point.

For example, one questioner via e-mail asked who might be the next secretary of the Treasury, a post of unprecedented power of economic decisions under the new enacted rescue plan for the financial industry. Neither candidate seemed eager to respond. McCain mentioned billionaire investor Warren Buffett, admitting he was an Obama supporter. Obama said he thought "Warren" would be a good choice but that there might be others. He named no one and went on to make another point.

McCain also mentioned Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, who for a time was cited as a potential vice presidential candidate (before Sarah Palin got the gig).

Want to make odds on either Buffett or Whitman winding up at Treasury? These are more like the kind of names you hear when a prospective president does not want to name the people he's really thinking about.

But key appointments will drive the next government, and voters should demand to know more about who they are likely to be. Why not tell us about your short list for State and Defense? And after the struggles of the past eight years, knowing who the next attorney general will be would make sense too.

For that matter, why shouldn't candidates be asked to name some people they have in mind for the Supreme Court? The four current justices who constitute the court's liberal wing are ages 69, 70, 75 and 88. Swing voter Anthony Kennedy is 72. Odds are that at least one or two of these seats will need filling by the next president, and one of the four conservatives (average age: 60) might need replacing too.

Yet we know only that McCain would appoint people like President Bush's two successful appointees and Obama would favor the kind of jurist appointed by Bill Clinton (the only Democrat to have had the opportunity in more than 40 years). That's a general contrast, to be sure, but not much more.

Of course, neither candidate wants to stir a distracting squabble over the qualifications of the people he may be considering. By the same measure, neither candidate wants to talk about immigration, because even a cautious formulation will cost votes either among Hispanics or among Anglos upset by those present in the country illegally.

What would either candidate do about the expiring No Child Left Behind Act? How about the faith-based initiatives sending tax money to religious institutions to perform nonreligious functions? Are there conditions under which the nation's defense might require reinstatement of the military draft, and if so, would it apply to women? Is it possible to contemplate a continuation of the Bush doctrine and current levels of forward deployment without a draft?

The salience of the economy as an issue has eclipsed the issues of Iraq and the war on terrorism. Indeed it has obscured the entire range of other issues, much as in the 1930s when all was subsumed in the Great Depression.

The single-issue phenomenon seems for the moment to be Obama's friend. But it is not really the voters' friend. It narrows the campaign's process of candidate discovery to a single obsessive concern, depriving the country of its best chance to find out just what its next leader really has in mind.

1:28 AM ET | 10- 8-2008 | permalink

comments () | | e-mail

 

Palin Proves Worthy of Her (Current) Role

Let's say you just arrived back in the U.S. from five weeks abroad, perhaps in a remote location with no access to news of America.

And let's say you tuned in to the vice presidential debate without preconceptions about either the Republican, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, or the Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware.

What would you make of what you saw?

Here was Biden, a man in his mid-60s working hard to preserve his dignity and govern his tongue. He kept it up for 90 minutes while also displaying some verve and flashing a warm smile. The more you knew about Joe Biden and his usual tendency to spiel on after making a point, the more you would have been impressed.

What's more, he seemed to have some real feelings and easy familiarity with issues and recent history.

But what of this woman? You would have to have been amazed to see her, given the political climate and expectations when you left in August. You would sense immediately that this unfamiliar face was the focal point of the evening, lighting up the stage and romancing the camera.

Palin was clearly two decades younger and, it must be said, strikingly attractive for a governor of any state. She also seemed the hunter through much of the evening, full of rhetorical energy and prepared to make her case in her own terms. She took the fight to her opponent from the moment she introduced herself and asked if she could call him Joe.

She also laid claim to the sympathies of the television audience, saying her answers might not please her opponent or moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS's NewsHour but that she was going to connect directly with the American people. Indeed, she spent the entire 90 minutes talking to the camera lens.

Sufficient are Palin's talent and skill that she was aggressive without being off-putting. She seemed eager and ready to engage on a range of issues, especially because she was asked only to hold forth on her positions and not to produce any specific information.

She had memorable phrases -- from "drill baby drill" to "white flag of surrender" -- and a lively demeanor that just wouldn't quit.

But did she seem to belong on that stage, poised to be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office?

That may be a question no one can answer in innocence. After just five weeks in the national spotlight, Palin has become a pivot point in American politics, defining our great divide. For those who have decided to believe in her as a rustic gem, a Harry Truman for our times, she represents the inherent, exceptional goodness of the American people.

There is a kind of naive genius in this national myth, and it wields great power, especially when associated with a sudden, new face. Something of the same dynamic has propelled the very different candidacy of the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama.

But on this night in St. Louis, the onus was on Palin. Did she prove she was ready to be president? Even her supporters would probably not go that far. Did she prove she was ready to be vice president? That depends on whether you think the qualifications for president-in-waiting are substantially lower.

What Sarah Palin did seem to prove is that she's qualified to be a vice presidential candidate. She is back to being at least a neutral factor in McCain's election equation, after three weeks as a skyrocket and two more falling back to Earth.

Proving herself worthy of her place on the ticket is significant because she failed to clear that bar in her recent disastrous interviews with Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News. Calls for her to step aside for the sake of the party may have been few and far between, but Internet blogs and talk radio can accelerate and amplify doubts overnight. For her sake, and McCain's, it was crucial that she prove herself by performing well against Biden.

That she did, at least for her partisans. And that was enough.

7:26 AM ET | 10- 3-2008 | permalink

comments () | | e-mail