Chuck Todd, Electoral Math & Lessons Not Learned
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack, Electoral College, Hillary, History, McCain, VideoFirst, one of the best breaks it down…
After watching this I’m reminded of the parallels to the Democratic primary season. Much like Hillary, McCain is now going to employ the “kitchen sink” strategy and thus run a big risk of looking extremely partisan. And no doubt it’ll drive up Obama’s negatives and close the gap a little, but this puts Obama in a position to sit back, look like the post-partisan figure he claims to be and get in a few strong jabs himself since McCain “started it.” This is exactly what happened in the primaries, albeit no votes have been cast yet during this cycle.
But let’s look for a moment at mechanisms that assured Hillary’s defeat. She ran a campaign about “experience” that was revealed in hindsight to be more of a “reelection” strategy than anything else. And while McCain would like everybody to believe he has pivoted to a “reformer” message, it’s still “experience” against “change.” We all know this. So McCain’s brand is pretty much the exact same as Hillary’s, and thus he’s running a reelection strategy too. And do note that she eventually tried to pivot to “change” as well, and we all saw how well that lead balloon floated.
What’s more, Hillary was woefully unprepared to fight after Super Tuesday, having thought that she would wrap it up by then. So, caught on her heels by Obama wins in Iowa, Nevada and a slew of Super Tuesday states, she tried to inject forces into states late in the game, but since Obama had been there from the beginning he simply out organized her at every single turn. True, she did get some late wins by big margins, but in states that Obama never planned to win in the general so he let them go. And in the big states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana he kept the margin close enough to deny Hillary any real momentum.
The same organization gap seems to be shaping up now for the general. In fact, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight (the current gold standard when it comes to electoral projections these days) details McCain’s woeful lack of organization at the local level…
Let’s be clear. We’ve observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voce, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn’t like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director. [...]Given a choice between taking embarrassing photos of empty phone banks, we give McCain’s people the chance to pose for photos to show us the action for what they continually claim we “just missed.†No more. We stop into offices at all open hours of the day, but generally more in the afternoon and evening. “Call time,†for both campaigns, is all day, but the time when folks over 65 are generally targeted begins in late afternoon and goes til 8 or 9pm. Universally, McCain’s people stop earlier. Even when we show up at 6:15pm, we’re told we just missed the big phone bank, or to come back in 30 minutes. If we show up an hour later, we “just missed it†again.
The McCain offices are also calm, sedate. Little movement. No hustle. In the Obama offices, it’s a whirlwind. People move. It’s a dynamic bustle. You can feel it in our photos.
Again, I think the parallels between Hillary and McCain are striking. True, McCain may well pull this out, but the road to that reality seems like it can only be paved with the type of campaigning that could completely ruin McCain’s credibility, much like it dented Bill and Hillary’s in the primaries.
We shall see…
This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, Electoral College, Hillary, History, McCain, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
