One of the unpleasant things you discover when you sit in major league
baseball press boxes from time to time is that the press -- or at least
the print media -- actually do not like close baseball games. A
walk-off home run or a blown save means that they have to re-write
their lead paragraph and perhaps their entire game story, leading to
angry phone calls from their editors, and forcing them to work later
than they might otherwise like to.
I was reminded of this when seeing this headline from Mark Halperin today:
A
tight race? It certainly is a tight race, and has been all year. But
this, of course, is not really the lead story. The story is that there
has been a rather dramatic shift in the national polling toward Barack
Obama in the past 2-4 days, coinciding with the Wall Street financial
crisis. Some pundits will love this, since it gives them something
fresh to talk about. But others, like those cynical beat writers in the
Wrigley Field press box, will be annoyed, because it means that the the
story they were telling us just a few days ago -- that the Obama
campaign was in trouble, that Sarah Palin was the greatest thing since
sliced bread -- has now been more or less invalidated.
Is
this shift really a result of the economic crisis? I believe that's
part of it, but I believe there are at least two other factors at work
as well.
The first is that McCain's performance in the polls in
the 7-10 days following the Republican convention did likely reflect a
bounce of some kind, rather than a permanent shift in the state of the
race. As I wrote just after the Republican convention concluded:
[We] should evaluate the robustness of the Republican bounce by how well it holds up to the currents of political time, rather than any specific date on the calendar. Specifically, I would want to see how the bounce holds up to the next major development of the campaign, particularly if it is a pro-Obama development. For example, let's say that Colin Powell endorses Obama tomorrow morning. I might expect a fairly strong reaction to this in the polls, not because the endorsement is all that important unto itself (most endorsements aren't), but because it displaces the GOP Convention as the most recent event of the campaign -- it pushes political time forward. And if the polls didn't move in reaction to such an endorsement, I'd think Democrats would have reason to worry.
The
Wall Street crisis was the first major event of the post-convention
news cycle -- the first thing that really tested the robustness of the
Republican bounce. And what happened? The bounce proved to be about a
mile wide but an inch deep. McCain consolidated elements of his base
(evangelical conservatives) during the Republican convention; Obama did
likewise with many Clinton Democrats during his convention.
But
the two campaigns also had a tug-of-war over independent voters, with
first Obama and then McCain winning them over. Independents, however,
are notoriously fickle in their Presidential choices, and as the
afterglow of the Republican convention wore off and was replaced by
news about the economy, they reverted back to the equilibrium point
they've been at all year, roughly splitting their votes between the two
candidates (Quinnipaic has independents dividing their vote 46-45 as of this morning).
McCain's
other problem is that Sarah Palin may no longer be an asset to the
ticket; in fact, she may be a liability. Averaging the candidates'
favorability scores across four recent polls -- as one should always
try and do when looking at favorability numbers since they can vary
greatly depending on question wording -- Palin now has the worst net
scores among the four principals in the race:
Palin's
average favorability score is now a +7 -- about 10 points behind Joe
Biden's numbers. Perhaps more importantly, these numbers are 10-15
points behind where Palin's numbers were just a week or so ago. If
voters come in not knowing very much about a candidate -- and the more
they see of the candidate, the less they like of the candidate -- this
is a major concern.
The McCain campaign may be in some trouble.
We should learn over the next several days, as further polling results
roll in, whether they are in a little trouble or a lot
of trouble. I would certainly not rule out the latter possibility.
There are now 46 days left until the election. The Obama campaign must
feel like, if they can spend 35-40 of those days talking about the
economy, they are in a very strong position. Excepting the three or
four days surrounding the foreign policy debate in Mississippi next
week, and the residual possibility of an unanticipated foreign policy
crisis, the inertia of the campaign probably means that they will have
the opportunity to do so.
Unless, of course, the McCain campaign
can throw up some roadblocks and distractions. McCain's is a creative
campaign -- more creative in many ways than the Obama campaign. As
such, we should not discount the possibility of their finding an
effective way to alter the momentum, perhaps one -- like their
'celebrity' critique of Obama -- that was difficult to envision in
advance.
At the same time, the campaign cost itself a lot of
credibility -- certainly with the media, and to a lesser extent with
voters -- with some of their shenanigans of the past week, most notably
Lipstickgate, "Thanks, but no thanks", and the Obama kindergarten
commercial. To use a crude metaphor, the McCain campaign may have blown
its wad too early. Organic shifts in the momentum of the race can and
probably will still occur, but they may find it more difficult now to
synthesize one.
--Nate Silver