Media Behind the Curve on Intensity Factor

by Mark Rhoads

Today's Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows John McCain reaching the 50 percent level for the first time since Barack Obama won enough delegates in June to nail down the Democratic presidential nomination. Ending with surveys taken Saturday night, McCain has maintained a three-point lead over Obama for three days and today leads 50 to 47 percent on a large sample of 3,000 likely voters.

CLICK HERE for the poll summary. The Gallup lead for McCain is two points with a sample of 2,787 registered voters as of this morning. The number of voters who say they are undecided or are for other candidates is unusually low in contrast with a normal presidential campaign in the middle of September and that might be partly attributable to the unprecedented length and intensity of the battle for the Democratic nomination.

Democrats in particular have a little more battle fatigue and expected to stroll to a cornoation until Sen. McCain suprised everyone with the Palin nomination.

The Rasmussen internal numbers are also interesting.  "McCain is viewed favorably by 57% of the nation’s voters while Obama earns positive reviews from 53% (see trends). McCain is supported by 90% of Republicans and has a six-point edge among unaffiliated voters. Eighty-two percent (82%) of Democrats say they’ll vote for Obama."

The fact that Sen. McCain's selection of Gov. Palin helped to unify the GOP base is no small matter by itself and there is now evidence that Republicans have made significant gains in polls that measure generic party choices for Congress.  Democrats have been mocking the idea that Gov. Palin would actually win over any hard-core Hillary Clinton supporters and that would make sense if one only looks at stark contrasts between Palin and Clinton on social issues.

But women voters are no more monolithic in their social and political preferences than men are and polls are measuring a small but still significant slice of former Clinton supporters that are now backing McCain/Palin for the primary reason that they still want to support a woman candidate.  Notwithstanding sharp differences on social views, they still prefer a woman candidate who might better understand the concerns of other women, even if those women come from a different end of the political spectrum.  The best anecdotal example of this rationale comes from Lynette Long, who has impeccable progressive credentials and who supported Hillary in the primaries but who now explains in The Baltimore Sun why she is for McCain/Palin. CLICK HERE to see the Lynette Long article.

McCain/Palin last week attracted enthusiastic crowds in several states including 23,000 people on a weekday morning in a park in Fairfax, Virginia where the northern Virginia battleground  has been targeted with a lot of Obama money and paid organizers.  The Obama fifty-state strategy is now a thing of the past.  The idea that Obama could flip states such as Indiana or North Carolina from red to blue is rapidly bowing the the reality of the last two quadrennial electoral college maps.  In fact, the 2008 map is going to look very similar to the 2000 and 2004 maps.

There could be as few as 11 electoral votes separating McCain and Obama--a far cry from the Obama landslide that media mavens were writing about in June. Small states such as Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, have become important again as they were four years ago and Ohio is once again important but leaning slightly to McCain at the moment.  The only big surprise is that Obama is still having as much trouble as he does in Michigan.  This difficulty is for very complex reasons including the fact that he passed up that state's primary to devote resources to caucus states and got started late there on organization for the general election and Hillary did well there.

Obama's choice seemed like the right one at the time but a locally unpopular Democratic governor and the resignation under a cloud of scandal by the Mayor of Detroit who was a key Obama supporter have complicated the Democratic campaign in that state. In the still very unlikely event that Republicans could flip Michigan from blue to red, then the McCain path to an electoral college majority gets much easier than the two Bush wins in 2000 and 2004.  The bottom line is that money spent in Michigan by both sides will be signficant and GOP and pro-McCain 527 money there is a good strategy if there is money for any Democratic leaning state.

If McCain keeps the 2004 map but loses Colorado and New Mexico--both now leaning Obama, he falls short and Obama wins.  This is why the intensity factor that Palin brought to the table is so important because intensity and turnout make a big difference in both of those states and in several other battle ground states.  Any shortcoming Palin might have in the opinion of the snobbish media is more than compensated for by her strong support among a different set of white women than supported Hillary.  There are plenty of Obama supporters who are still very enthusiastic in their support for Obama and they can get re-energized again but the ground game now shifts to a more normal population of stable long-time residents and home owners that are not so much interested in what rock band is playing at an Obama rally but are more interested in specific and concrete Obama ideas that have so far been lacking.