The site FiveThirtyEight notes that Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is now on the ascent in various polls — and the key questions are whether this ascent will continue and, if so, by how much.
Could this be another year when self-assured mid-October assumptions of Democrats and the media’s conventional wisdom will prove in the end to have a bit less value by the end of November as Mervyn’s current stock?
John McCain has once again improved his position in the national tracking polls, having gained ground in 4 of the 5 6 trackers that published today (Rasmussen and IBD/TIPP were the exceptions).** Our model now perceives that Obama has come somewhat off his peak numbers, which were realized perhaps 5-7 days ago.
At the same time, McCain’s improved position in the trackers is a little bit difficult to reconcile with certain other pieces of evidence. In the Research 2000 tracking poll, for instance, while McCain has gained 5 points worth of ground in 48 hours in the topline numbers, the candidates’ approval ratings over that period are completely unmoved. In the Gallup tracker, while McCain has gained ground among likely voters since the debate, he has lost ground among registered voters. Lastly, every poll conducted on the debate itself suggested that Obama won the event.
What I think we may be seeing are some improvements in Republican enthusiasm. Prior to the debate, McCain was having a very rough go of things in the media, as the only stories seemed to be the ineffectiveness of his attacks on Bill Ayers, and the nonresponsiveness of his campaign to the economy. In the polls that measured these things, there was evidence that enthusiasm was very low among McCain supporters. A conservative voter, having little real message to latch on to, and seeing McCain far behind in the polls, might have been telling pollsters that he wasn’t sure if he was going to bother to vote, and therefore might have been screened out by likely voter models, which all of the tracking polls are now using.
In his post, Nate Silver argues that McCain’s Joe the Plumber, I’m not George Bush, and Obama-wants-to-spread-the-wealth gave the Arizona Senator some substantive talking points and GOPers some compelling reasons to get the polls and vote against Obama.
But also keep in mind polls could also be influenced by robocalls (if these calls were wastes of time, no one would do them) and news stories detailing the calls’ content, plus a continuing larger attack waged on television and radio repeatedly trying to link Democratic Sen. Barack Obama to domestic terrorists and, overall, raising doubts about Obama’s patriotism. McCain’s latest line of attack will be even more attractive to GOPers and solidify the base: he’s calling Obama’s policies comparable to socialism.
Key question: will McCain continue to go up in the polls? Silver thinks McCain may have a ceiling:
What I don’t know that McCain is doing, on the other hand, is actually persuading very many voters, and particularly not independents or registered Democrats. If that is the case, than McCain is likely to run into something of a wall very soon here, brought about the Republicans’ substantial disadvantage in partisan identification. People sometimes misunderstand the nature of “momentum” in presidential campaigns. If McCain was down 8 points yesterday, and is down 6 points today, that does not mean that he is likely to be 4 points down tomorrow. On the contrary, polling in the general election seems essentially to be a random walk, with the minor stipulation that the polling has had some tendency to tighten slightly during the stretch run (as our model accounts for). That is, the polls are essentially as likely to move back toward Obama tomorrow as they are to continue to move toward McCain.
McCain’s other problem is that the polls in battleground states have not really tightened at all. Obama gets good numbers today, for instance, in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Florida. Obama presently has something like a 3:1 advantage in advertising, and most of that advertising is concentrated in battleground states. As such, this may serve as a hedge against any improvements that McCain is able to make elsewhere in the country.
Also factor into something Obama is attempting to combat: Democratic overconfidence that can border on smugness. Those who followed 2004 closely remember it well…In my case, weblogs and reporters’ conventional wisdom close to Election Day was that Democratic Sen. John Kerry was on the fast track to the White House — until the actual counted votes started to appear. Democratic-oriented weblogs virtually had Kerry being sworn in early in the evening…
It isn’t until THIS LADY sings — and she hasn’t sung yet. Campaign 2008 has been peppered with many sudden twists that caused the conventional wisdom to be scuttled.
With some two weeks of campaigning to go and McCain on the ascent, Republicans shouldn’t give up — and Democrats shouldn’t be getting ready to throw one mean Presidential inauguration party just yet…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.