Is the election narrowing?
National polls are now regularly giving Barack Obama upwards of 50% of the vote, making him the heavy favorite to win the election. Unusually, however, a relatively significant amount of voters are still undecided. At this point in 2004, for example, less than 4% of Americans had not made up their mind between Kerry and Bush; the latest CBS/NYT poll, on the other hand, showed 9% yet uncertain. That difference might not appear especially large, but it signifies the difference between a tight election decision and a landslide.
Presidential elections usually narrow for the simple reason that if the front runner can’t put it away by the final weeks of the campaign, he rarely succeeds then. Obama has earned 50% of the vote largely by solidifying the Democratic backing that Kerry and Gore recieved, and then adding a few votes at the margins. These are the relatively low-hanging fruit for a Democratic candidate. Whether he gets 51% of the vote or 57% of the vote - in other words, whether this is a Bush 2004 type victory or a Reagan 1980 victory - will be determined by people who are usually solid Republicans. Intuitively, this should make sense; Bush got 48% of the vote in 2000 and 51% in 2004. If McCain’s 39% can be assumed to have voted overwhelmingly for Bush, and Obama’s 52% largely Kerry and Gore voters, then the 9 points in the middle should largely come from voters who probably backed Bush not once but twice. And in fact, the CBS/NYT poll finds that 2/3rds of the undecided voters did vote for Bush in 2004.
What this means is that the final two weeks of the campaign are being fought on John McCain’s turf; he doesn’t need to convince the undecided voters that conservativism is good or that taxes are bad. When candidates wage come-backs (think Truman of 1948, or Humphrey in 1968 or Ford in 1976), all of whom were very much behind with only a few weeks to go, this is their major advantage.
McCain, however, faces two major difficulties. The largest one is that considering Obama is already over 50, McCain needs not only to sweep the undecided voters but to steal large chunks of votes from Obama. The second problem is that though these voters largely backed Bush in 2004 and vote Republican regularly, it is October 24th and they remain undecided. The reason certainly has much to do with the general disillusion with Bush specifically and the Republican Party generally. For whatever reason, since the general election began in earnest in June, John McCain has gained virtually no support on the national level. In individual states, McCain still hasn’t crossed the 50% threshhold in North Carolina, Indiana, or even the generally uncontested Georgia.
If in the usual election, undecided voters come home - Republicans vote for Republicans and Democrats vote for Democrats - there are unusual elections. In 1980, for example, Reagan was in a similar situation to Obama with only a few weeks to go, when undecided Democrats (so-called Reagan Democrats) decided en masse to flip to him and gave him a landslide. It could happen again.
The truth of the matter is that there is really no way to tell because the undecided voters are remaining just that; undecided. There are reports that the Democrats will have a massive turn-out advantage, based both on stories about Obama’s field operation that performed so impressively in Iowa and the other caucus states, and from early voting. It is certainly true that Democratic voters are unusually impassioned. Then again, there doesn’t seem to be a lack of passion from many Republicans about Sarah Palin or Bill Ayers. We also don’t know if the large amounts of early Democratic voters mean anything more than Obama has placed a large emphasis on getting people to vote early.
What may be telling is that there is a general air of collapse in Republican ranks at all levels. Michelle Bachmann, a Republican Representative from Minnesota, for example, suggested that the patriotism of US Congressmen should be examined. Within days, a race that was assumed to be sewn up for the Republicans burst open, and Bachmann is now the underdog. It is striking how flimsy, in retrospect, Bachmann’s support was. In Kentucky, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has seen his once-solid lead dissipate over the last two months by Bruce Lunsford, a Democratic businessman who has never won elected office, and was twice defeated for a gubernatorial nomination, despite being self-funded, and won the Senatorial nomination this year with only 51% against an obscure businessman named Greg Fisher. Like Jon Lovitz, can McConnell believe he’s losing to this guy? But he is also a (slight) underdog, an incumbent with less than 50% of the vote. If Republicans can’t win down-ballot elections in MN-8 or in Kentucky, and are getting obliterated in open Senate seat elections in swing states like New Mexico and New Hampshire, then what chance does John McCain really have?
And so the story ends as it began, with nine percent of the country who after two years of campaigning and scores of debates, still aren’t sure whether John McCain or Barack Obama should be the next President of the United States.