Obama leads by 0.23%

McCain closes the gap, but Bush’s gesture presents a challenge

My new projections are:

Barack Obama 46.10
John McCain 45.87

As per usual they are based on samples of likely voters filtered through Samplemiser. Because of the Quinnipiac and the Zogby polls the fall in Obama’s rating was reduced, but the latest Rasmussen poll has pushed them downwards. However, McCain really needs to make sure that he gets ahead of the Iran issue and makes sure that he does not agree with Bush’s bizzare gesture towards negotiations with Iran.

Could McCain try and turn Hawaii Red?

Should McCain choose Linda Lingle as his running mate?

West Wing fans will remember a scene in the final series where the Republican candidate, the McCain like Arnold Vinnick, discusses with his staff how to deal with a surge in polling his opponent, for the Obamaesque Matt Santos. One of the ideas tossed around by a member of his staff is for him to go after a blue state, suggesting Hawaii. Although this idea was never acted upon, it was suggested in the comments that Governor Linda Lingle might be worthy of consideration. From a persue of the internet and Lexis Nexis, there are aguments in favour of this. Unlike Sarah Palin (or Bobby Jindal) Linda Lingle has six years of experience under her belt and she is extremely popular in her state. There is no doubt that if McCain wanted to choose a female running mate who could step into his shoes, if needed, she would be a solid choice.

However, choosing her would have quite a bit of downside and wouldn’t do much to help McCain. Her pro-choice record, her support for a plan that many have described as secessionist, the fact that campaigning in Barack Obama’s birthplace would be a huge waste of resources and her dour personality all militate against putting her on the ticket. Of course, my three favourites candidates are all all pro-choice, with Lieberman and Giuliani coming from deeply Blue States and Condi Rice coming from the deeply Red Alabama. However, even I admit that McCain will never win the home state of Barack Obama, while there are polls showing a McCain/Rice and a McCain/Lieberman ticket being competitive in the Empire State. In any case Lieberman has earned enough respect with his criticism of Clinton and his attempt to clean up Hollywood, Giuliani can talk about adoptions and Condi can modify her position enough to satisfy social conservatives.

Most importantly, Governor Lingle doesn’t bring anything to the table that other candidates don’t. Indeed, if McCain really wanted a popular female governor who was experienced enough to take over in an emergancy, he could do a lot worse that choose Jodi Rell of Connecticut. Using the terminology of the fictional Russell ‘Stringer’ Bell, Linda Lingle is the personification of a fifty degree day. Obivously, she’s not the Alaskan winter that Carly Fiorina (or Mitt Romney) would be but she doesn’t do anything for the ticket and her choice would be perceived as a attempt to dodge the fundamental question of what image McCain want to project.

Obama’s lead falls to 1.06%

More good news, but will it last?

My new projections are:

Barack Obama 47.01
John McCain 45.95

As per usual they are based on samples of likely voters filtered through Samplemiser. Now, having been positive about McCain chances (if not those of Rick Davis) I don’t want to reverse course. However, I’m still worried that Obama’s move to the centre is not being challenged. McCain’s team need to get out and painting Obama as someone who fundamentally dishonest about his left-liberal record, rather than a panderer. They cannot allow Obama to go into the convention season perceived as a centrist.

Why there is only one plausible female Republican running mate

It’s Condi, not Sarah, Kay or Carly

There is strong speculation that McCain will try to make history by choosing a female running mate, either as a gesture in itself, or as a response to Obama choosing a female running mate. My view is that there is only one credible female candidate, Condoleezza Rice. Now, by saying that there is only one credible female Republican candidate I am not denigrating female politicians, or trying to be a chauvinist. The fact is that the pool of female Senators and Governors is sadly very small, so it is logical that McCain should have extremely limited options when I think there are only two strong male running mates (Lieberman and Giuliani) and several reasonable choices (Ridge, Huntsman Jr & Alvarez). Indeed, in addition to the Secretary of State only Sarah Palin, Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Carl Fiorina have been tipped by commentators.

Firstly, I think that the political benefits of choosing a female running mate are wildly overestimated. The ‘Hillary-istas’ (women who supported Hillary because she was a woman) will eventually return to Obama, or support McCain, irrespective of the gender of any running mates. In fact Hillary Clinton fans might actually prefer to wait until 2012 so that Hillary can run again, and not look kindly on a woman who tried to steal any limelight that they felt belonged to Hillary Clinton. The only exceptions to this are single African-American women who identify more with Condi’s story than that of Hillary’s. Choosing a female running mate in response to Obama might even look like pandering. More importantly, I think that Sarah Palin lacks the experience; Kay Bailey Hutchinson is too much of a Republican hack while Carly Fiorina would be a disaster.

Indeed, Carly Fiorina represents the worst side of the Mitt Romney wing of the Republican Party. I don’t much care for Romney but at least he took the time to be elected to an office before running. In contrast, Fiorina not only put profit (and stock options) before patriotism but she has never shown any inclination for public service whatsoever. She is an execrable campaigner, who didn’t even both to read up on McCain’s record on abortion before she tried to make up social policy on the hoof. While Lieberman, Rice and Giuliani are all pro-choice they would be savvy enough to make sure people knew that McCain was in charge of that area. Although many people say she would help McCain in terms of economics, the fact her experience in that area would lead many people to believe that her presence in the Naval Observatory would let the CEO wing of the Republican party continue to run riot in a McCain administration. After all, while most Americans accept that free trade and balanced budgets are necessary for the American dream, they are also tired of the ‘no-government anarchism’ that a vocal minority in the Republican party support.

Sarah Palin is also overrated. As Jindal’s problems in Louisiana demonstrate, it is patently absurd to lionize anyone before they have had a chance to prove themselves and, more importantly, shown that they can face adversity. There is also the question of whether McCain really wants a candidate who disagrees with him on energy policy and whose state is associated with big oil. There is also the risk that voters in Alaska might not vote for McCain/Palin ticket because they would rather have her as governor, rather as their Vice-President. Such sentimentality may sound silly but, as William Weld found out in 1996, it can sometimes have a very powerful impact on voters. In any case McCain should be trying to use his choice to turn blue states red, not to nail down far flung outposts that are relatively unimportant in electoral terms.

There are also positive reasons for picking Rice. Although she may have been underwhelming as Secretary of State and more mercenary and ‘neo-Condi’ in her beliefs than anything else, she does has enough credentials and experience to credibly assume the office of President. Also, with her on the ticket the temptation to revisit Iraq would be too tempting for even the newly disciplined Obama campaign. Even if I am sceptical of the necessity of choosing a women from an electoral perspective, I also believe that if McCain has to choose a mainline conservative (though he needs to choose a centrist) it would be nice to choose one who is as different from a while male as possible. At a minimum choosing Condi would signal that the Republican party is prepared to move with the times. I also believe that there is a significant minority of African-American voters who were turned off by the whole Wright-gate incident to the extent that, while they were not prepared to reward Hillary’s references to ‘hard working White people’, they are prepared to cross party lines in November provided appropriate gestures are made. Indeed, I firmly predict that choosing Condi would enable McCain to do much better among African-American voters than Bush did in 2004, even adjusting for potentially higher turnout.

Obama’s lead falls to only 2.2%

A bridge too far or a worthwhile trade-off?

My new projections are:

Barack Obama 47.1
John McCain 44.9

As per usual they are based on samples of likely voters filtered through Samplemiser. Now, as the graph shows, this is the first time Obama’s lead has fallen outside the 4-6 point range in nearly a month. There are two interpretations for this, one positive and one negative (for McCain). The positive interpretation is that Obama’s sudden U-turn on almost everything he has stood for has been too fast to be credible and is transparently false. Furthermore, it has emphasised his inexperience and the potential pitfalls of electing somone who was a State Senator four years ago. However, the other intepretation is that Obama has done what Bill Clinton did in 1982, which is to take a short term hit (in Clinton’s case by apologizing for his mistakes as governor) to achieve a long term stategic objective. My gut feeling is that even if the latter is the case, the extra 4-5 points that Obama will undoubtedly lose will be enough to ensure a McCain victory (albiet a small one). In any case McCain’s team desperately need to make the case that Obama’s left-liberal voting record undermines any attempt he might now make to run to the centre, while moving back to the centre himself.

(Even) The Daily Kos gets it

Apparently a stuck clock does tell the time correctly

Bizzarely enough there is occasionally some cogent analysis from The Daily Kos. In this case it is a diary suggesting that McCain needs an attack dog. The article is of course a swipe at Romney, and I think that Lieberman or Giuliani would be better attack dogs, but it does reveal a wider truth in that portraying Obama as unprincipled is certainly not helping and might even be counterproductive if it helps him move to the centre. Whether Obama is really a centrist or not McCain cannot let him move from throwing Wright under the bus to trying to channel Mike Huckabee. Certainly, such advice would be better than the bizzare suggestion that he should use the election to construct a coalition for 2010.

Why is McCain running such a lacklustre campaign?

Some musings on McCain’s campaign

Andrew Sullivan said a few days ago that, ‘this shift is yet another instance of Obama’s remarkably shrewd post-primary strategy. He is slowly undermining every conceivable reason to vote for McCain’. Although Sullivan later qualified his statement with the usual guff about Obama being a pragmatist, this is pretty much Obama’s stategy. Obama realises that the unpopularity of George W Bush and the lacklustre economy, combined with the institutional problems that have been building up for several decades now, mean that a generic Democrat will beat a generic Republican. Therefore he is trying to take away the one issue on which the nation divides in half on, and which potentially could propel McCain into the White House. Of course Obama will take the hit from the flip-flop, but there is clear evidence that the American public are prepared to put up with a panderer, provided it is a pander that they agree with. In essence Obama is trying to transform himself into a (at least superficially) cleaner version of Hillary Clinton in order to get the benefit of her much larger lead over McCain.

I still think McCain should be the favourite, simply because there is no way he can run a worse campaign that he has done so far, but he needs to either get in Obama’s face or find a credible surrogate who can do the job for him. At the moment his decision to pander to the right on economic matters and remain strangely silent on foreign policy is extremely disappointing. Even his few supporters in the press, such as The Economist, are now asking, why he has started ‘saying things it is very hard to imagine that he remotely believes in. Given that this strategy is proving a failure it is interesting to see why he is still doing it. The most optimistic belief is that he is laying the framework for something really radical, such a putting Joe Lieberman on the ticket. In this case it might make sense to assure economic conservatives that he is still a Republican, so when he does change course, there isn’t a full scale revolt. A variation on this, and one that might also be likely, is that he needs to raise significant amounts of money before the convention, so he needs to stress his conservative credentials, a stance he will abandon when he is nominated and enters the public funding system. Both strategies are unnecessary, but at least give some hope that he will change course.

Liar!

Forget flip-flopping, McCain’s team need to go for the jugular

On the one hand it is good that even the darling of the antiwar left now recognises that a over hasty withdrawal from Iraq would be disastrous. However, the truth is that Barack Obama has not had the sort of conversion that comes on the road to Damascus but one that sounds suspiciously like the road to his pollster. Unfortunately the McCain team need to be quite catagorical in their response. Instead of portraying him as a flip-flopper they need to directly question his integrity. After all can someone who didn’t miss an opportunity to vote against the war and who as late as last September was talking about a withdrawal within six months really expect the voters to believe that he has changed on the issue? It might give the McCain campaign short term pleasure to go over the beaten track and claim that he is a flip-flopper or that he was pandering to the anti-war left, but the fact is that they must make clear that he was lying to the American people.

A good start but McCain needs to go further

McCain finally loses faith in Rick Davis

McCain’s decision to give Steve Schmidt primary responsibility for Day to Day operations is a step in the right direction. However, as I have been saying, McCain’s problem is not just organisation but the huge strategic blunders his campaign staff made. Running to the right, failing to go after Obama and his failure to stress Iraq were not anything to do with the number of precinct captains, important as ground support is. McCain needs to go futher, he needs to find someone like either Dick Morris, Marshall Wittman or Bill Kristol who can give his campaign focus. Bob Dole’s deputy campaign manager has been manifestly not up to the job.

Note: I stopped posting for a while. This was not because I’ve given up in despair at the McCain campaign but simply because I had started a new job. I will resume normal service.

Obama’s lead down to 4.1%

Is McCain bouncing back, or is this just an illusion?

My new national projections are:

Barack Obama 49
John McCain 44.90

This might just be the usual polling noise but I feel that McCain’s campaign may have turned a corner, especially when one looks at it in the context of the Missouri poll. Using the fictional Russell Bell’s scale this might not be a 50 degree day for McCain but it is not a 40 degree day either. In any case the Obama camp should be worried, especially given that for the last three months they have run a very good texbook campaign.

NOTE: My methodology for my detailed polling projections involves collating all the available polls of likely voters and then filtering them through Samplemiser, a Kalman filter. I only used polls of likely voters and I get my data from pollster.com.

McCain leads Obama by 6.50% in Missouri

Can we now say that Obama’s bounce is now over?

My latest projections for Missouri are:

John McCain 49.61 Barack Obama 43.11

There is finally some good news for McCain and his staff. Missouri is a key bellweather state and one that only has a tiny bias towards the GOP. Although this would be less than Bush’s margin of 7%, this shows that the Obama bounce is definitely subsiding, though no thanks to McCain’ staff.

Obama leads by 3.93% in Pennsylvania

Not too bad for McCain but he needs to move closer to Obama.

My latest projections for Pennsylvania are:

Barack Obama 45.97
John McCain 42.04

McCain obviously trails Obama in Pennsylvania. However, a deficit 3.93% isn’t too bad considering Obama’s national lead and Pennslyvania’s (small) bias towards the Democrats. However, Charlie Black’s gaffe should serve as a wakeup call for a much needed rearrangement of the staff.

A Man in the Arena

Why McCain needs to invoke the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt

As I have said elsewhere, it is obvious from the polls that that McCain’s attempt to run on a hard right tax cutting agenda isn’t working, and more importantly is something that McCain doesn’t believe in. In reality McCain is a right of centre populist who believes in free trade, school vouchers and attacking wasteful spending but also believes in regulatory reform, global warming, expanding access to health care and is worried about inequality. He also supports issues such immigration reform, energy independence and balanced budgets which are neither right nor left. Just as his best moment on foreign policy came when he directly confronted Ron Paul, his best two domestic policy moments came when he attacked Romney (and implicitly Giuliani) over the ‘profit not patriotism’ line and Huckabee over his regressive tax plan.

The Democratic lead on economic issues and their lead in the generic ballot means that there is simply no popular appetite for further economic conservatism. Obviously, Dick Morris is the last person who should be giving policy advice and his stuff about oil speculators and companies is simply demagogic nonsense. However, his contention in a recent interview that, ‘McCain can win by entering the democratic primary. He has to be a democratic opponent to to Obama. He should be a populist, and win over (working-class) Hillary voters’, is correct. It is also self-evident that the Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson wing of the Republican Party, who seem to have hi-jacked the McCain campaign, seem hell-bent on blaming everyone else, including the very people that McCain needs to win over, for his predicament. For instance, even the normally reasonable Irwin Seltzer seems to have gotten into his head that the one person to blame for Bush’s failures in the past two years is not Bush himself but Joe Lieberman.

So what should McCain do? I think the first thing McCain needs to do is to stop trying to be a third rate Barry Goldwater. Even though Obama has tried to give the illusion of moving to the centre there is plenty of room for McCain to come up with a tax plan that is a bit more progressive and which closes more loopholes, while still keeping economic conservatives on board. McCain should also stop hedging, instead of talking about building a few more nuclear power plants in the next twenty years he should talk about building a whole generation by 2012, a goal that is achievable if foreign technology is allowed to be imported into the US and Yucca Mountain is opened up. As I have said before McCain also needs to make overtures to those on the DLC wing of the Democratic Party. Although this may seem radical, it would be no different from the Republican recruitment of hawkish Democrats, such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfovitz in the mid to late 70s. I am not suggesting that McCain should go overboard or do anything silly, but moving the Republican party to the centre, by enabling conservative Democrats to vote for McCain, would do more to help protect the idea of free trade and market solutions than anything the NRO wing of the GOP have come up with so far.

Obama’s lead returns to 5.90%

Obama’s bounce persists

My new national projections are:

Barack Obama 48.95
John McCain 43.05

Unlike my previous projections, there is no way that these results can be spun. Although, in time McCain’s ratings might start to catch up with those of Obama this is completely unecessary risk. McCain’s campaign has been poorly run with it increasingly reminding one of the dog in James Thurber’s short story, afraid to attack Obama because of a perceived backlash, afraid to move to the centre because that would offend the ‘base’ and most importantly afraid of mentioning the war in Iraq, even though McCain actually leads on this issue in the polls. Indeed, in terms of economic policy you could be forgiven for questioning where the imprint of Thompson and Romney ends, even though McCain has had a distinguished record fighting for the interests of hard working Americans. On domestic issues McCain desperately needs a declaration of independance.

NOTE: My methodology for my detailed polling projections involves collating all the available polls of likely voters and then filtering them through Samplemiser, a Kalman filter. I only used polls of likely voters and I get my data from pollster.com.

Why McCain should oppose drilling in ANWR

Why McCain needs to stand firm on ANWR

No policy can ever be set in stone in absolute terms. For instance, I firmly support a much stronger stance against Iran, including military action if needed, and I think that the Bush tax cuts were unsustainable. However, if Iran changed its government, was willing to stop supporting terrorists in Iraq and abandoned thoughts of a nuclear programme, a diplomatic solution might suffice. Similarly, I strongly believe that tax cutting made sense in the early Reagan era when marginal rates were punative (and there was a case for some sort of tax cuts at the end of the Clinton presidency. Context is, as always, going to be king. It could possibly even be argued that the rapid spike in oil prices makes more extensive drilling a sensible policy. In fact I have to say that set against the life and liberty of twenty million Iraqis (and seven million Israelis) I couldn’t frankly care less about the fate of a few polar bears in Alaska (not least because I don’t live in Alaska). However, flipping on ANWR, or even wobbling, is bad political strategy for McCain. This is because his opposition to drilling in the Alaskan wilderness reserve was one of the defining issues that symbolised his differences with the Republican party.

Right now, McCain needs to maintain (and even emphasise) such differences, even on the symbolic level. Indeed, if he is not ready to start advocating comprehensive immigration reform again, or reminding voters of his battles on behalf of Middle Class America, then the least he can do is not to make yet more concessions to the right wing on his party. Henry Kissinger is not someone who I either respect or agree with but trying to appeas ‘the base’ with further concessions on domestic policy is like trying to quench one thirst with salted peanuts. This doesn’t mean that he has to ignore their concerns, and he could do a talk a lot more about soft values (starting with a plan to prevent any more school children following in the steps of those young hussies in Massachusetts) but he needs to make sure that he is not seen overreacting to events and that he needs to stand up for what he believes in.