No matter what the polls show at any given moment, as long as you frequents progressive circles, it is inevitable that you will hear some variation on the following statements: it shouldn't be this close or Obama should be ahead by a lot more. Part of this is comes from some progressives never being able to understand why anyone would vote for Republicans, a sort of "everyone I know voted for McGovern" provincialism. Mostly, however, it comes from understandable frustration that, after the 2006 victory, with equally large House and Senate gains on tap for 2008, after Bush approval rating dropped to 29%, with over 70% of Americans saying that they don't like the direction of the country, and after a Democratic primary that seemed to turn the entire country into Democrats, people wonder why we aren't cruising to a big victory. We seem to be winning everywhere else, and the country seems to agree with us on just about everything, so why is the Presidential election in any doubt at all?
In the extended entry, I provide perspective on this question.
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To answer this question, I went back and looked at the national vote results of the 2006 U.S. House elections. Two years ago, Democrats won 52.52% to 44.32%, with 3.16% of the vote going toward third parties. This 8.2% strikes me as a pretty good estimate of where things "should" be, if the Presidential campaign was going as well as other recent elections for Democrats. It is true that Obama has financial parity, or even a slight edge, on McCain and the RNC, whereas in 2006 Republicans enjoyed a substantial edge in campaign fundraising and outside group spending. Then again, two years ago, Democrats ran unopposed in about 25 more districts than Republican ran unopposed, so maybe the 8.2% figure is inflated.
Leaving aside the differences for a moment, let's assume an 8.2% national victory is where Obama "should" be in this election. Given the same number of third-party supporters, and assuming that undecideds break in the same pattern as voters who have already decided, Obama's current advantage of 48.3%--42.7% in the Pollster.com national trend translates into a victory of 51.40%--45.44%. That would put Obama 2.24% below the 8.20% victory target. Under the same conditions assumed above, a lead of 49.4%--41.7% would put Obama exactly at the target number.
So, Obama is actually only 2.1% below where he "should" be, given Democratic performance in 2006. He should be up by 49.4%--41.7%, but instead he leads 48.3%--42.7%. This is lower, but not too much lower, and easily accounted for by some rather obvious factors in the campaign. Specifically, for the past eight years, John McCain has consistently been the most popular Republican in the country, and still has an average favorable rating close to 60%. This isn't something that Democrats have seriously tried to attack, given that only 10% of Obama's ads a re negative, and that every criticism of McCain is always prefaced with profusive compliments about how McCain is a great American. Second, Obama is African-American. A third, and equally obvious factor, is that campaigns really do matter. The quality of a campaign will always impact the final result.
Those three factors can easily account for 2.1%, and actually I am kind of surprised that they don't account for an even larger difference. Perhaps the quality of Obama's campaign is partially canceling out the first two factors. Or, perhaps we are just at a high point, and the national trend will come back to earth soon. Either way, I hope that this post helps provide some perspective to the crowd that regularly asks "why aren't we ahead by more?" At this point, we "should" be ahead by about 7.7%. Subtract the national average at Pollster.com from that number, and usually you will arrive at a fairly small difference of 3-6%. It shouldn't be hard for anyone to imagine that avoiding 3-6% swings in politics is far from guaranteed. That is, it shouldn't be hard to imagine such a swing, unless you are one of those people who doesn't understand why Republicans receive more than 10% of the vote. |
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