by Damozel | Apparently independents are far more moderate than McCain---who was elected by his own party's moderates---seems to have bargained for. While I don't have too much faith in polls, Obama's clearly been pulling ahead during the last couple of weeks. Of course this is just one poll (CBS News/New York Times), but perhaps it does carry a message about how voters are reacting to McCain's recent tactics.
The Obama-Biden ticket now leads the McCain-Palin ticket 53 percent to 39 percent among likely voters, a 14-point margin. One week ago, prior to the Town Hall debate that uncommitted voters saw as a win for Obama, that margin was just three points.
Among independents who are likely voters - a group that has swung back and forth between McCain and Obama over the course of the campaign - the Democratic ticket now leads by 18 points. McCain led among independents last week. (CBS)
Certainly that poll indicated that voters might have been put off by McCain negativity.
McCain's campaign strategy may be hurting hurt him: Twenty-one percent of voters say their opinion of the Republican has changed for the worse in the last few weeks. The top two reasons cited for the change of heart are McCain's attacks on Obama and his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate. (CBS)
As I was saying, you can only fool all of the people some of the time. While the Republican "base" consists of the subgroup of the some who can be fooled all of the time, Americans in general are smart consumers, I think. They're quite capable of assessing Palin's suitability for high office. They also won't have forgotten where the Rovian tactics used to elect Bush got us.
McCain mistook a niche market for the general public and pitched his dog whistles only to the most extreme type of conservative. If this keeps up, only the real knuckle-draggers will be voting Republican on the presidential ticket this time.
There's also the temperament/personality issue, which conservatives Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Buckley both cited as the reason for preferring Obama to McCain. Conservative columnist George Will called McCain "a flustered rookie playing in a league too high."
And quite a few conservatives in addition to the above-mentioned have complained of inability to take Palin seriously as a vice-presidential contender: Kathleen Parker, David Frum, and Matthew Dowd, to name a few. [Dowd, a strategist for Bush, even said that McCain had knowingly endangered the entire country by picking Palin. (BN-Politics)]
The one thing that does seem to have emerged is that ordinary Americans---the sort not in a permanent state of panicky fear and consequential rage---don't like personal attacks, or at least not in a time of crisis.
The New York Times elaborates:
After several weeks in which the McCain campaign unleashed a series of strong political attacks on Mr. Obama, trying to tie him to a former 1960s radical, among other things, the poll found that more voters see Mr. McCain as waging a negative campaign than Mr. Obama. Six in 10 voters surveyed said that Mr. McCain had spent more time attacking Mr. Obama than explaining what he would do as president; by about the same number, voters said Mr. Obama was spending more of his time explaining than attacking.
Over all, the poll found that if the election were held today, 53 percent of those determined to be probable voters said they would vote for Mr. Obama and 39 percent said they would vote for Mr. McCain....
Voters who said their opinions of Mr. Obama had changed recently were twice as likely to say they had grown more favorable as to say they had worsened. And voters who said that their views of Mr. McCain had changed were three times more likely to say that they had worsened than to say they had improved.
Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice---who, after all, knows moderates----says:
Many independent voters don’t like demonization and divide-and-rule politics. They wanted to see a post-Bush-era campaign of serious issues...Moderates and independents are often dismissed as wishy washy because they don’t follow a party line, or in the tank for one side if they dare become critical of it (at all levels of politics, people now demonize those who disagree with them). In fact, McCain could have done a lot better in this campaign had he a)run a campaign of issues, b)gotten back on the tightrope he gingerly walked during the campaign season, trying to win over his party base AND moderates and independents, c)picked almost any other primary who had been in serious consideration for Vice President than Sarah Palin. (TMV)
But of course, there's still time for events to undercut the apparently inevitable. Can McCain really make a comeback? My guess is no---particularly since Palin has to be factored in. But tomorrow is the final debate and maybe he can pull a couple of dozen rabbits out of the hat, which is what he'll need to do, while remaining sunny and genial. And, well, there's also this:
With the election unfolding against the backdrop of an extraordinary economic crisis, a lack of confidence in government, and two wars, the survey described a very inhospitable environment for any Republican to run for office. More than 8 in 10 Americans do not trust the government to do what is right, the highest ever recorded in a Times/CBS News poll. And Mr. McCain is trying to keep the White House in Republican hands at a time when President Bush’s job approval rating is at 24 percent, hovering near its historic low. (New York Times)
At Liberal Values, Ron Chusid comments:
With McCain’s strategy of basing his campaign on smears and ignoring the issues backfiring, it remains difficult to see how McCain can get back into the race. The negative impression he has created by his dishonest and erratic behavior during the campaign so far is unlikely to be erased should he finally change his campaign to deal with the issues. Even if the campaign should honestly deal with the issues it is doubtful this could help McCain considering how he is on the wrong side of most of the issues.
As skippy remarks, it's pretty clear that current voters are negative about negativity.
Marc Ambinder, a comparatively detached blogging commentator, has discussed this poll and its "draw-dropping numbers." The McCain campaign, he predicted, would have to respond pretty sharply, which is what they did, saying that the poll is volatile and improbable.
Asked to respond to the poll, which gives Barack Obama a a 14 point lead among likely voter, the official said via e-mail that the sub-group shifts it showed were improbably large.
"My sense is if they repeated this poll again tonight or tomorrow, they would show the race in the same five to eight point margin as do other national polls as the margins with Independents would not be so dramatic and the white vote would be closer to other national polling during this time period," the official said. (Marc Ambinder)
Well, we'll see. Ambinder points out:
The CBS News / NYT team stands by their poll, and many other polls (Gallup, ABC News/Washington Post) are picking up similar shifts in sentiment, although the volatility in some of the subgroups -- remember, the sample size is smaller for them -- is not as apparent(Marc Ambinder).
At FiveThirtyEight polling wunderkind Nate Silver muses on the numbers.
Perhaps the CBS poll that shows Barack Obama with a 14-point lead among likely voters (12 points when third-party candidates are included) is a modest outlier. But if so, John McCain has more and more outliers that he has to explain away these days. There are now no fewer than seven current national polls that show Obama with a double-digit advantage: Newsweek (+11), ABC/Post (+10), Democracy Corps (+10), Research 2000 (+10), Battleground (+13), Gallup (+10 using their Likely Voter II model) and now this CBS News poll.
These are balanced by other results that show the race a hair tighter. Our model now projects that, were an election held today, Obama would win by 8.1 points. It also expects that the race is more likely than not to tighten some....
It's fairly unusual for a candidate to have such a sustained run of momentum so deep into the campaign cycle. And it does appear to be real momentum, with some real feedback loops: the worse McCain's poll numbers become, the more desperate his campaign looks, and the more desperate his campaign looks, the worse his poll numbers become.
At Obsidian Wings, Publius recalls "the dreaded outlier syndrome."
There’s two explanations for an unfavorable poll — (1) the poll is defective; or (2) your candidate is losing. I clung quite tightly to #1 throughout 2004 — you might even say I developed a problem....I’m not gloating about any of this. I — like every liberal here — went through this same water torture in the fall of 2004. It sucks. But take it from someone who's been through it, clinging to hopes of outliers and reweighted party IDs is just . . . well, a river in Egypt.
More bloggers commenting at Memeorandum....
RECENT POSTINGS
Bush Strategist: John "Country First" McCain Put the Whole Country at Risk by Choosing Palin
Damning Report on Justice Department Politicization
Harry Shearer: "Bridge to Nowhere"
Buckley Leaves National Review and the Republican Party's Very Small Yurt
Pentagon Wants $450 Billion More, Should Maximize Current Funds First
Comments