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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Greating from TPT

As regular readers will know I am not American. In fact my side was on the losing end of the War of Independance. However, I wish all readers a happy fourth of July.

Well actually it’s a 5.05% lead but who’s counting?

My new national projections are:

Barack Obama 49
John McCain 43.95

I don’t know what is more strange; McCain’s utterly aparthetic style of campaigning or the fact that despite all that, and despite Obama’s move to the centre McCain is still within spitting distance of the Audacity of Hype (sorry, Senator Obama). Part of me wishes Obama were racking up double digit leads because that would have forced McCain to make some real changes to his campaign’s strategy rather than tinkering with the organisation. In any case any sensible person would think that Rick Davis’s days are now pretty much numbered, but I have been saying that for a while now.

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.

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.