October 21, 2008
Mac Zilber
One Path To Victory Remains for McCain
John McCain’s campaign has announced that it will not spend any more money in five Obama-leaning swing states swing-states: Colorado, Maine, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. When added to the campaign’s similar concession in Michigan weeks ago, this means that John McCain now is spending money in only one Kerry state: Pennsylvania. Consequently, a victory in Pennsylvania is the only way that McCain can win this election (barring a cataclysmic event that shakes up the electoral landscape).
Assuming Obama wins all of the states that McCain has “conceded,” as well as Iowa and New Mexico (in which McCain is poised to concede, due to double-digit deficits), he has 252 essentially guaranteed electoral votes, with 270 needed to win. By winning Florida or Ohio, which are both states in which he leads, Obama can seal the deal. He can also do so by winning Nevada and any one of the following swing-states: Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, or Missouri. But the easiest way to get to the magic number of 270 is for Obama to win Pennsylvania, which is a state that McCain now essentially must win if he wants to win the election.
The tough part about this gambit for McCain is that Pennsylvania is a heavily blue state. While the conservative “Pennsyltucky” region of the state is considered to be part of appalachia, the bulk of Pennsylvania’s population lives in either the rust belt or the Northeast corridor, and the state went to Kerry, Gore, and Clinton. Fivethirtyeight.com gives Obama a 98% chance of winning the state, and he leads by a whopping 15.3 points in the pollster.com polling average there. In fact, the polling average in the state currently makes realclearpolitics.com consider it the 21st likeliest state to swing from one party to the other, and it is more blue than all 6 states that McCain has forfeited. So why did McCain bet his whole campaign on this state?
We have to remember that every strategic decision the McCain camp makes is predicated on “if we gained eight points in the polls based on a major game-changing news event, would this help us?” If McCain got this race back to a tie, he would still probably be trailing in the states he has conceded, because they have been Obama-leaning the entire cycle. He might be able to pull off a victory in Colorado under that scenario, but it likely wouldn’t be worth that much effort to get Colorado’s nine electoral votes. If something happened that upset Obama’s polling numbers by that much, the places that would be affected it the most would be in the South and Appalachia; regions that are less comfortable with the color of his skin and his brand of progressivism. In a tied election, North Carolina and Florida would probably be heavily McCain leaning, Ohio and Indiana would tilt McCain’s way because they’re reddish states by nature, and Virginia would come right down to the wire. In this situation, Pennsylvania would become the key tipping point state, and McCain would have to hope that his Ayers-based campaigning would pay off in “Pennsyltucky” the way it has in West Virginia (where he has gained 8-10 points in the last week). This is his final route to the presidency, and the forfeit of 5 of the 15 most important swing-states indicates that McCain knows that it’s his final chance.
One other interesting byproduct of this decision is that Republican senate candidates Norm Coleman, John Sununu, Bob Schaffer, and possibly even Susan Collins are going to be hurt by this move. If McCain isn’t getting his base to the polls in these senate battlegrounds then the down-ticket candidates are going to be hurt. It’s worth noting that Collins and Coleman were the two Republicans who criticized McCain’s negative campaigning, so this could also be a partially vindictive move.
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I don’t like the misquotes of either candidate. I would prefer to hear the truth from both of them, but McCain is the worst. He just comes right out and lies, knowingly. That is one reason I will not vote for him. Another reason is the way he cheated on his wife when she faithfully waited for him. I commend her loyalty to him by her willing to vote for him. It speaks to her character, not his. Another reason I will not vote for him is because of him accepting the choice of his party for a running mate. I realize that he did not pick her, but he should have had the back bone to stand up and say, “Just because the country was in love with Hillary does not make this decision right. A woman, yes, but a woman who knows about the issues of this country.” They, simply picked a female with looks, wearing high heels and lipstick. She may have been a good Governor for Alaska, but she knows, absolutely, nothing about how to, even, begin to work on the issues that face us and I am a woman. Hillary Clinton she is not. Another reason I will not vote for him is his campaign methods. If you want to destroy someones character, at least tell the truth and please tell me, who is Joe the plummer accept a man who doesn’t have a license to do the work he says he is qualified to do, has no plan laid out to purchase a business, makes less money than my husband and is in no danger of having his taxes raised for, at least, the next 10 years? Another reason I will not vote for McCain is because he has a volatile temperment. I pay close attention to people when they are speaking. He clinches his jaw when he is upset and blinks his eyes, excessively. The clinching of the jaw is a sure sign of angry and nervousness. The blinking is a sure sign that you are lying. He constantly makes the statement that ‘people like you and I don’t want our taxes raised.’ Who are those people? I can’t help but believe that they are the people he has voted for many times to give tax cuts to, those who make over $250.000 and their taxes won’t raise anytime in the near future from what I have read and understand about Obama’s tax plan. I am casting my vote based on the positive’s and Obama has them. He is a loving husband and father. He is nurturing, warm, intelligent, strong, compassionate, a listener, a working man, someone who knows what it is like to come from the bottom, someone who knows what it is like to have doors closed in his face, someone who has experienced discrimination, someone who has experienced love and wisdom from a mother and, most of all, grandparents, someone who did not take advantage of the system straight out of Harvard but pushed his sleeves up and went to work for those who could not pay the big buck, someone who has learned how to work with people: democrats, republicans, whites, blacks, hispanic, illegal aliens, legal aliens, old, young, educated, uneducated, illiterate, mentally challenged, foreigners abroad and at home, who believes in and trust in God, and because of his belief in God and his struggles, someone who can identify with every group and every nationality he comes in contact with. This is the man who should lead this country and I will cast my vote for Senator Barack Obama!!!