18 States Versus One Country -- Obama and McCain Have Different Ways Of Sizing Up The Electorate

This week, it's McCain supporters whose thinking brains have been taken over by a tumbling of terrifying thoughts. Sarah Palin's favorable numbers have collapsed! McCain's lead is gone! Obama's competitive in states he shouldn't be! The campaign completely mucked up its response to the economic crisis! The truth-fudging didn't work!

Lift up from the thoughts, a bit, and you'll see the race returning to familiar territory, albeit with three important differences: Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting for John McCain than they were thanks to his selection of Gov. Palin, Democrats have unified, mostly, around Barack Obama, and the culture war, which tend to benefit Republicans given the distribution of the electoral college, has been pulled up from the minor leagues.

Enough voters have the same concerns about who Barack Obama is and enough voters have the same concern about whether John McCain represents the continuation of a third Bush term.

In the recent data, there's plenty for both campaigns to take solace in, and plenty for them to be concerned about.

They're interpreting the daily events with reference to their own campaigns' assumptions about how to win the race.

To wit: the Obama campaign will have a massive resource advantage in each state it contests. In past elections, Democrats have had to pull together GOTV operations on the fly as if cramming for the final; this cycle, their field teams are extravagant and efficient. These are multiplier machines, and they're already turned on, culling, identifying and persuading tens of thousands of new voters. The upshot is that historical partisan trends aren't sticky; the electorate within each state has much more give to it relative to the national swing. That's why Indiana, which hasn't voted for a Democrat since 1964, can be considered competitive -- more so than West Virginia.  

What does this theory predict insofar as electoral strategy? Don't overload resources in any particular state. Winning Nevada doesn't mean that Obama will win Ohio.

The McCain campaign possesses what one might call a waterline theory of the race. That is: the fundamental partisan orientation of the state matters a lot, is very sticky, and will, in the absence of an absolute tsunami, keep the relative range of the two-party vote roughly the same. In this view, if Obama can win Indiana, he'll definitely be able to win Missouri; if he can win Georgia, then he'll clearly have won Indiana. If he wins Missouri, he'll have won Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. The national background noise is louder -- more consequential -- for McCain than it is for Obama. We can some intuit some particular strategic insights: McCain will play more in some states than others. He doesn't have to worry about Obama winning Nevada and losing Ohio; in the McCain view, if Obama wins Ohio, he'll win Nevada, and the race is over.