History Suggests McCain Faces an Uphill Battle

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October 13, 2008
History Suggests McCain Faces an Uphill Battle
By JOHN HARWOOD

Has Senator John McCain fallen too far behind, too late in the presidential campaign, to overtake Senator Barack Obama?

That is the question facing strategists in both parties three weeks before Election Day. History suggests that the answer is probably so.

Mr. Obama has already made history as the first African-American to become a major-party nominee for president. But his breakthrough represents a wild card that could yield election returns at odds with poll results. Beyond that, Mr. McCain’s hopes rest on capturing the support of undecided voters, as well as shaking loose some voters who support his Democratic rival.

No one, including Mr. Obama’s advisers, says such a turnaround in Mr. McCain’s favor is impossible. But the magnitude of Mr. McCain’s task may leave him depending on a misstep by Mr. Obama or a national security crisis rather than on what he can achieve through speeches, advertising or a winning performance in the final debate on Wednesday.

“At this point,” said Matthew Dowd, a strategist for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, “the campaign is totally out of John McCain’s hands.”

A Gap Tough to Close

In the latest Gallup tracking poll, Mr. Obama leads Mr. McCain 50 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. Mr. McCain’s deficit in that survey has remained seven percentage points or more for most of the last two weeks.

Since Gallup began presidential polling in 1936, only one candidate has overcome a deficit that large, and this late, to win the White House: Ronald Reagan, who trailed President Jimmy Carter 47 percent to 39 percent in a survey completed on Oct. 26, 1980.

Yet Mr. Carter, like Mr. McCain today, represented the party holding the White House in bad times. After Mr. Reagan successfully presented himself as an alternative to Mr. Carter in their lone debate, held on the late date of Oct. 28, he surged ahead. After two debates, Mr. Obama holds a lead that is approaching Mr. Reagan’s eventual margin of victory.

In 1968, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey all but erased a 12-point early-October deficit before losing narrowly to Richard M. Nixon. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore wiped out a seven-point deficit in the final 10 days of the election, winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College to Mr. Bush.

But since polling began, the pattern is that swings in opinion get smaller as Election Day approaches and voters gather more information. As American politics have grown more polarized, the opportunity for large swings has become smaller still.

Four years ago, Senator John Kerry trailed Mr. Bush slightly in the homestretch. A near-even split on Election Day among the few remaining undecided voters sealed Mr. Kerry’s defeat.

“There appears to be more flex in the current electorate than in 2004, but less than in 2000,” said Richard Johnston, research director of the National Annenberg Election Survey, at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mr. McCain’s strategists acknowledge that for a realistic chance to win the election through battleground states, Mr. McCain must reduce Mr. Obama’s advantage in the national popular vote to no more than three or four percentage points.

Since 1948, front-running candidates have typically preserved three-fourths of their October leads, said Larry M. Bartels, a political scientist at Princeton. Applying statistical theory to current polls, he pegged Mr. Obama’s chance of winning the popular vote at “a little over 90 percent.”

Mr. Bartels noted three factors that might skew the results. Two of them, a potential surge in voter turnout and the tendency of undecided voters to punish the party holding the White House during an economic downturn, appear to favor Mr. Obama. The third, racial resistance among white voters, favors Mr. McCain.

Focus on White Voters

Ahead in once-reliably red states like Colorado, Florida, Ohio and Virginia, Mr. Obama need not win any new voters. If he holds his 50 percent share in Gallup’s survey, and third-party candidates like Bob Barr and Ralph Nader draw 3 percent collectively, Mr. McCain can pull no closer than 47 percent.

The McCain campaign sees scant opportunity to erode Mr. Obama’s near-monolithic support among blacks and his two-to-one edge among Hispanics. But Mr. McCain’s strategists think that one in five white voters — roughly 15 percent of the electorate — remains open to persuasion.

The campaign says that those voters tend to be younger, single, less educated and female, and that they also include senior citizens distressed over sagging investments. Those voters are the target audience for Mr. McCain’s recent attacks on Mr. Obama’s ties to William Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground.

If one-third of those voters shift allegiance from Mr. Obama to Mr. McCain, they will produce a 10-percentage-point swing, wiping out Mr. Obama’s lead. Mr. Obama’s strategists say voter preferences have hardened enough to make that difficult.

Mr. McCain’s assessment of whether it is possible may influence the zeal of his campaign’s efforts to assail Mr. Obama’s character. Facing heavy criticism, Mr. McCain late last week turned ambivalent.