John McCain Facing Long Odds
Posted by: Editorial Staff | 08/04/2008 6:45 PM
Our friend Joshua Trevino over at Trevino Strategies just published this piece about his thoughts on the presidential race. His conclusion, regardless of the bump in recent polls, John McCain still faces extremely long odds to win the election.
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Read the rest of the article here.
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To put it as starkly as possible: right now, Barack Obama needs another 32 electoral votes to become President of the United States. John McCain needs another 107.
John McCain's Long Odds
By Joshua Tevino
The big news in polling this week is that John McCain has caught up with Barack Obama. Supposedly this race is now a race, and we may enter the full-blown national election season after Labor Day with the outcome truly up in the air.
Don't believe it. Nothing is impossible, and John McCain may yet be the 44th President of the United States -- but probability and circumstance decisively favor Barack Obama.
There is a welter of evidence that the McCain campaign has pulled even in national polls on the strength of negative ads. (See this one, in which Obama is derided as a vapid celebrity, and this, which appears to be an implied attack on Obama as -- bizarre as it seems -- the Antichrist.) The most recent data are from Gallup and Rasmussen: today's Gallup daily tracking poll, which shows McCain within three points of Obama. (At the end of last week, this poll had them tied 44-44.) Today's daily tracking poll from Rasmussen Reports has McCain with a one-point advantage. Prior to this, a mid-July Newsweek poll already had the candidates in a dead heat. So, though it remains possible to find recent polls with a decisive Obama advantage (see CNN's 30 July numbers), the aggregate of national polls show a tightening race.
This data is interesting, but not especially relevant: presidents are not chosen by a national ballot, but by fifty statewide votes which allot their respective electoral votes. Therefore, the truly predictive polls are those conducted per state. Here, Barack Obama retains a decisive advantage.
It is useful to begin with a look at the 2004 electoral map, showing George W. Bush's 286-251 electoral-vote victory over John Kerry. The President's victory mirrored the general governance strategy of Karl Rove, which focused upon maximizing bare majorities: the theory being that a strong 51% coalition was preferable to a fractious 70% coalition. There are many flaws to this modus operandi, in policy and in politics, but what is relevant here is the consequent failure to meaningfully extend the national party base beyond the states necessary for 270 electoral votes. The Republicans found themselves, quite nearly by design, a regional party of the South, the Mountain West, and greater Appalachia, and did not exercise themselves to reach out to regions where they could plausibly make inroads -- specifically, the upper Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic states. The Democratic Party under Howard Dean, by contrast, was quite willing to modify its specific appeal to its areas of regional weakness. The Republican "run up the score" stratagem, even at its best, has natural limits: in the absence of outreach elsewhere, then, shifts in voter behavior and coalitions almost inevitably favored the Democrats.
And so they have. According to Real Clear Politics, polling aggregates reveal the following eleven states as "tossups" in 2008 (respective electoral votes in parentheses): Virginia (13), Missouri (11), Nevada (5), New Mexico (5), New Hampshire (4), Indiana (11), Colorado (9), Florida (27), North Carolina (15), Ohio (20), and Michigan (17). That's nine states and 116 electoral votes that Bush won in 2004; and two states and 21 electoral votes that Kerry won in 2004. Put a different way, John McCain is playing defense for over five times the number of electoral votes that Barack Obama is. To add insult to injury, RCP has Iowa, a Bush state in '04, out of the tossup column and leaning for Obama now. By contrast, McCain has a lead in none of John Kerry's '04 states. Within the RCP tossups, he leads in three states -- Florida, North Carolina, and Missouri -- all of which were '04 Bush states. In that same bracket, Obama leads in both the '04 Kerry states, and five of the '04 Bush states. (Polling in New Mexico is too infrequent for RCP to make a call, but it strongly suggests an Obama lead.)
To put it as starkly as possible: right now, Barack Obama needs another 32 electoral votes to become President of the United States. John McCain needs another 107.
Read the rest of the article here.
The real issue is not how well Obama or McCain might do in the closely divided battleground states, but that we shouldn't have battleground states and spectator states in the first place. Every vote in every state should be politically relevant in a presidential election. And, every vote should be equal. We should have a national popular vote for President in which the White House goes to the candidate who gets the most popular votes in all 50 states.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral vote -- that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
Because of state-by-state enacted rules for winner-take-all awarding of their electoral votes, recent candidates with limited funds have concentrated their attention on a handful of closely divided "battleground" states. Two-thirds of the visits and money were focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money went to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people have been merely spectators to the presidential election.
Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide.
The National Popular Vote bill has passed 21 state legislative chambers, including one house in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, and Washington, and both houses in California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The bill has been enacted by Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland. These four states possess 50 electoral votes — 19% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.
See http://www.NationalPopularVote.com
Susan, leaving aside the somewhat disturbing fact that an NPV system would run directly contrary to the Founder's federalist intent, the reality is that it would actually increase(!) the concentration of campaign money and attention that you decry. NPV would encourage candidates to "run up the score" in core areas, rather than divide their energies between various regions. For example: right now, once a candidate is assured of 50%+1 in a large state, the electoral vote system encourages him or her to focus upon winning 50%+1 in other, perhaps smaller, states. Under an NPV system, this incentive disappears, as it becomes far more cost effective to simply increase the margin in the large state. Why focus on majorities in, say, all of New England, when you can get bigger numbers with a limited and relentless focus on Boston and the NYC exurbs in Connecticut?
The sad truth about NPV is that it will result in the very evils that its proponents denounce. Time to put the issue to bed.