Looking Back at 2004 and 1992: Solidifying Support Two Weeks Out

So we hear it everyday now. The wheels are coming off of the McCain campaign. With poll numbers at a seemingly insurmountable level, many pundits are preemptively calling the election for Senator Obama. Though it definitely makes me nervous to agree with them, history tends to agree. I looked back at the 2004 and 1992 elections for reference, and both instances made me feel more confident that polling one to two weeks out is a strong harbinger of the final point spread on election day.

On Thursday (10/23), the New York Times posted the results of their latest NY Times/CBS poll. Obama is up 52-39 in the poll among likely voters. This spread is quite incredible and when you look back at the Times's past polls at roughly the same time in the 2004 and 1992 campaigns, the results seem to provide an early window to the eventual spread. Take this from a similar October 25, 1992 article.

The upshot is a tighter race. Among the probable electorate, which reflects the likelihood of each respondent's voting on Nov. 3, Mr. Clinton now has the support of 40 percent, Mr. Bush of 35 percent and Mr. Perot of 15 percent, the poll shows. In early October, before the debates, Mr. Clinton stood at 46 percent, Mr. Bush at 38 percent and Mr. Perot at 7 percent. Elation in Bush Camp

Bush campaign officials, elated over signs in this and other polls that Mr. Clinton's substantial lead was eroding, predicted that voters were entering a new phase of decision-making that would put a premium on trust. "It's moving our way," said Charles Black, senior adviser to the Bush campaign.

But Clinton strategists disputed the Times/CBS poll, noting that other independent surveys, while showing a closer race, did not show the gap as small as five percentage points. "I never question somebody's polls," said James Carville, senior strategist for Clinton. "But this is the first private or public poll with a margin like this."

The quote from the Bush campaign sounds similar to some of the soundbites coming out of the McCain campaign this weekend. In the end Clinton beat George H.W. Bush 43.0% to 37.7%, a difference of 5.3%. Ross Perot received 18.9%. If according to the poll that 10% were undecided nine days before the election, it seems that each candidate got roughly equal shares of that group. In 2008 this group is standing at 9%. Say they break 5% and 4% for each candidate. The final result should stand at Obama 57% and McCain 43%. My feeling is that the undecideds could break the opposite way just as easily, but really any changes are marginal.

In 2004 the same poll showed President Bush with 47% support and John Kerry with 46%. Again, very much in line with the eventual result, Bush 50.7% and Kerry 48.3%. This is a 3.7%-2.3% break. Again, the undecideds split with each candidate getting a sizeable percentage.

So barring something unforeseen, Senator Obama seems to be solidifying support similar to the winners of the 1992 and 2004 elections in the closing days of this election.

NY Times Endorsements: 1860 to Present

The New York Times just endorsed Barack Obama. Ok, so I know that's not a big surprise, but after I read through the article, I noticed one of those lovely little multimedia tools that seem to be one of the Times's fortes.

This one lets readers scroll through a timeline of all of the paper's endorsements since 1860. You can also link to a pdf of the original article! I found a couple of interesting parts to the multimedia tool.

First, the Times has not endorsed a Republican since 1956 and second, the difference in the tones of each endorsement are rather stark. For instance, the 1860 endorsement of Abraham Lincoln features this quote.

Things will go on very much as they have hitherto - except that we shall have honesty and manliness instead of meanness and corruption in the Executive departments, and a decent regard for the opinions of mankind in the tone and talk of the Government on the subject of Slavery.

The utter boringness of this quote really underscores the man that they are endorsing. It also seems as if they were slow to grasp how divided the country was on the brink of the Civil War.

And how about this rather ominous quote from their 1996 endorsement of President Clinton.

The Presidency he once dreamed is still within his reach if he brings the requisite integrity to the next four years.

The tool is definitely worth a thorough perusal.

Last Debate Night: McCain Channels Nixon

Well, it's over. The final presidential debate for this campaign was concluded at Hofstra University in New York last Wednesday. All I can say is I'm glad, for John McCain's sake, that these debates are over. The guy simply is far too transparent emotionally to be a good debater.

Most of the pundits would agree that McCain came out swinging and tried like hell to break Obama's cool and to some degree on points he could be considered the winner. But during the Richard Nixon debates when Richard Nixon came across better over the radio than on television,

This was a problem that Richard Nixon had. Nixon looked disparagingly at John F. Kennedy and it shows. As we all know now, both men disliked each other immensely, but Nixon's condescending attitude towards Kennedy really showed, as seen in the debate clip below.



Compare that to one of the clips from the 3rd debate (you all remember the air quotes clip, right?). The addition of the split screen is extremely damaging.



Especially in an election when many of the policy differentials of both candidates are already so well known, BODY LANGUAGE MATTERS!!

Is it 1980 or 1968?

With Barack Obama's recent surge in national polls, several pundits are trying to decipher what the final electoral outcome will be. Some are saying that a landslide like Ronald Reagan's 489-49 Electoral College rout of Jimmy Carter in 1980 is a distinct possibility. Other's are cautioning that a closer election could still be in the cards. The 1968 nailbiter between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey is often referenced. Humphrey came back from a deficit similar to McCain's current one to nearly defeat Nixon. Humphrey only lost by 0.7 percent in the popular vote, and the networks did not call the election until the Democrat lost Illinois by a little over 100,000 votes early the next morning.

Check out these two post-election analyses from 1968 and 1980.





I guess the safest thing to say is that technically it could go either way. Do I think it will? Not a chance. The night of November 4, 2008 will look more like November 4, 1980 than November 5, 1968.

As you'll hear Walter Cronkite and others discussing on the 1980 clip, the undecideds broke really late for Reagan. There was only one Presidential debate that the two candidates agreed on that year. It was held the week before and the outcome was devastating for Carter - it featured the famous Reagan line, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" The electorate shifted to Reagan over the weekend and ended up giving him nearly 51 percent of the vote. Carter received 41 percent, and Independent John Anderson received 6 percent.

According to the latest Gallup tracking poll, the Obama-McCain numbers are not that far off (51-42). With no third-party candidate enjoying nearly as much popularity as John Anderson, expect the undecideds to continue to steadily break to both candidates over the next three weeks. The reason I'm making this prediction is because so many of the political currents that framed the 1980 race have already occurred or been presented during the course of this campaign. In our media saturated environment, with an electorate that has seen both candidates on television or the internet perhaps twenty times more than they ever saw Ronald Reagan prior to the 1980 election, the process has simply been sped up a bit.

Could McCain stage a Humphrey like resurgence? Perhaps but not likely. Humphrey's resurgence came after he gave a speech harshly critical of LBJ's Vietnam War policies late in the campaign. I can't see McCain making a similar break.

Make no mistake - I'm not predicting that Obama will win by 440 electoral votes. The country is far too polarized for that, but he should win by a similar margin in the popular vote, and probably a comfortable 150-170 margin in the electoral college.

Who's Really Taking a Page From Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush? John McCain

Have you ever heard of the term, "All politics is local"? Well maybe "All politics is cyclical" is more appropriate in describing Election 2008.

Earlier this week, during a speech in Albuquerque, John McCain injected a new theme into the campaign that is sure to increasingly be his campaign's sole mantra as we get closer to election day. Here's the Republican nominee in his own words.

This is all part of the McCain campaign's attempts to "otherize" Barack Obama. According to New York Times columnist, Nicholas D. Kristof in a September 20 op-ed.

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

The "differences" that are being referenced by McCain seem to lack specifics, but when put together into the whirlwind assault delivered in Albuquerque, McCain hits home the point that Obama is not one us. This in turn can be used to reinforce racial and religious stereotypes in voters' minds.

The "otherize" option seems desperate because it is. It's a hail mary pass, it's getting rid of the goalie, and a host of other sports analogies. Though whether it will work with a opposing candidate who is African-American remains to be seen, this tactic is not new. Case in point - this ad by Jimmy Carter from late in the 1980 campaign provided by the Museum of the Moving Image.



Or something similar from George H.W. Bush in 1992.



In both instances, the incumbent lost. They failed to sufficiently otherize their challenger. Obama actually enters mid-October in a better polling position than both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton did. The key difference is that Reagan and Clinton only had to deal with the possibility of being otherized because of their policy positions or lack of consistency, not because of their ethnic backgrounds.