History Suggests McCain Faces an Uphill Battle

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: History Suggests McCain Faces an Uphill Battle
By JOHN HARWOOD
Published: October 12, 2008

Has John McCain fallen too far behind, too late in the presidential campaign, to overtake Barack Obama? That is the question facing strategists in both parties three weeks before Election Day. History suggests that the answer is probably so.

Mr. Obama has already made history as the first African-American to become a major-party nominee for president. But his breakthrough represents a wild card that could yield election returns at odds with poll results. Beyond that, Mr. McCain’s hopes rest on capturing the support of undecided voters, as well as shaking loose some voters who support his Democratic rival.

No one, including Mr. Obama’s advisers, says such a turnaround in Mr. McCain’s favor is impossible. But the magnitude of Mr. McCain’s task may leave him depending on a misstep by Mr. Obama or a national security crisis rather than on what he can achieve through speeches, advertising or a winning performance in the final debate on Wednesday.

“At this point,” said Matthew Dowd, a strategist for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, “the campaign is totally out of John McCain’s hands.”...

***

Mr. McCain’s strategists acknowledge that for a realistic chance to win the election through battleground states, Mr. McCain must reduce Mr. Obama’s advantage in the national popular vote to no more than three or four percentage points....

Since 1948, front-running candidates have typically preserved three-fourths of their October leads, said Larry M. Bartels, a political scientist at Princeton. Applying statistical theory to current polls, he pegged Mr. Obama’s chance of winning the popular vote at “a little over 90 percent.” Mr. Bartels noted three factors that might skew the results. Two of them, a potential surge in voter turnout and the tendency of undecided voters to punish the party holding the White House during an economic downturn, appear to favor Mr. Obama. The third, racial resistance among white voters, favors Mr. McCain....

The McCain campaign sees scant opportunity to erode Mr. Obama’s strong support among blacks and his two-to-one edge among Hispanics. But Mr. McCain’s strategists think that one in five white voters — roughly 15 percent of the electorate — remains open to persuasion.

The campaign says that those voters tend to be younger, single, less educated and female, and that they also include senior citizens distressed over sagging investments. Those voters are the target audience for Mr. McCain’s recent attacks on Mr. Obama’s ties to William Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground. If one-third of those voters shift allegiance from Mr. Obama to Mr. McCain, they will produce a 10-percentage-point swing, wiping out Mr. Obama’s lead. Mr. Obama’s strategists say voter preferences have hardened enough to make that difficult....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/politics/13caucus.html?ref=todayspaper

[stopbush]

1. Translation:

"But Mr. McCain’s strategists think that one in five white voters — roughly 15 percent of the electorate — remains open to persuasion."

translated:

"But Mr. McCain’s strategists think that one in five white voters — roughly 15 percent of the electorate — is racist and remains open to persuasion."

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Yep. nt