election strategy

Newsweek has done a post mortem labelling the McCain campaign effort among the worst in recent history, even comparing it to McGovern/Eagleton

http://www.newsweek.com/id/167561

The reasons were primarly as per Newsweek a) Palin and b) McCain's failure to be optimistic.

Now I think this is nonsense, pretty much. Had McCain chosen a bland, experienced running mate GOP turnout would have been even more dismal, probably ending another dozen house careers and 2-3 senate careers.  And running "morning in America" in the face of a single digit "right track" number would have been mocked as painfully out of touch and clueless. 

But there's a bigger problem with this thesis. McCain's effort was only mildly subpar compared to its "peer group"

Since 1960, the following candidate have tried to get a third consecutive term for their party.

1960; Nixon 49.5%

1968 Humphrey 42.7% (third party in double digits)

1976 Ford 48%

1988 Bush 41  53.4%

2000 Gore  48.4%

http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/

McCain ran slighly behind the number that Nixon, Ford and Gore had; all of whom were running in better economic times than this year.  He ran ahead of Humphrey, who was saddled with fallout from a far more unpopular war than Iraq, but due to the weird quirks of 1968, nearly won the popular vote and nearly forced the election into the House.  The only candidate of the bunch that stands out is Bush 41, who ran under times of peace and prosperity; had the brilliant Lee Atwater running the campaign; and faced a very weak opponent.

The proximate cause of McCain's defeat was , in my opinion, the Wall Street bailout. In specifics, once he made the call to suspend the campaign he needed--barring such immovable objects as scheduled debates--to get the issue off the burner as soon as possible.

On September 29, McCain left Washington for a rally with Palin in Columbus OH. Now he was going back to OH plenty more---what he needed to do was beg, borrow and plead with House Republicans to pass the bailout bill that afternoon so he could declare the crisis resolved and get back on the campaign trail without having this hang over him. I have no diea if haunting the Capitol building would have squeezed out enough votes--I just know the bill failed in the House, keeping the crisis at full boil for another precious campaign week.  http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/09/29/ (Yes, the bailout was a "crap sandwich"; but McCain had already endorsed getting one passed;  the ship had sailed as far as coming out against it)   

September 29, 2008 was the day John McCain's best chance to become President slipped away. This was one political event that should have been left to Governor Palin to handle solo.  Having gone "maverick" and back to DC,  switching gears to go back on the campaign moved to be a tragic miscalculation for McCain.

The Newsweek article does point out McCain's inability to stay on message as far as policy differences between Obama and McCain.  That observation isn;t very novel and when I sit down and catalog the myriad Mac errors, that will be among them. 

America faces many deficits. Some can be measured easily by metrics: i.e a  budget deficit or a trade deficit. 

But there's a far more debilitating deficit in our nation today. The confidence deficit

Without confidence business transactions grind to a halt and political progress is stalled as rational actors play the old zero-sum game.

This week the McCain campaign had an opportunity to address this confidence deficit.  The opportunity passed. And indeed, now they demonstrate their own confidence deficit.

First, let's look at the root causes of the confidence deficit. I trace them to Bush's annus horrible in 2005 when social security reform died, Katrina was an unmitigated disaster and Bush alienated his core supporters with the Miers nomination. Add Iraq to this brew and we get the 2006 midterm thumping. At rhe end of the day, the public lost faith in Bush and it seems Bush lost faith in what had worked in the first term for him.

The Democrats who took power in Congress then exacerbated this problem. Their "vision" was of accepting defeat in Iraq and running the same ethically challenged Congress they decried---only with an even greater level of incompetence.  The lowest approval ratings in recent history were to be expected.

Hence the opening for a "Hope and Change" presidential candidate. By mid-summer it was self evident that Obama's spiel was inspirational to the young and partisan, but was falling on deaf ears to the older and more jaded.

McCain's campaign mocked the "messiah' and then made a bold move that regained the political advantage. They picked Sarah Palin for V.P.

Promoted and bumped. -Patrick

Wisconsin has been a state that has been a near tie in the past two Presidential elections.  In 2000, Al Gore beat George W. Bush by the very slim margin of 5,708 votes, a difference of 0.22 percentage points.  2004 was a near replay of 2000, as John Kerry beat Bush by a similar margin of 11,384 votes, a 0.38 percentage point difference.  Consiering these totals, it would be ludicrous for either McCain or Obama to assume Wisconsin will be in their pile.

What are McCain's keys to victory in Wisconsin?  First, he has to minimize the damage that Obama could do in Milwaukee and Madison.  In 2004, Bush came out of Milwaukee County with a 117,000 vote deficit.  It is likely that McCain will run no better or no worse than Bush.  With a declining population, Milwaukee can't turn out that many more new voters than other places in Wisconsin.

As the GOP in Congress appears about to be taking an "every man for himself" strategy for the fall elections, Gallup has just given the Republicans another gift (Americans Oppose Income Redistribution to Fix Economy). The results of this poll show that if the GOP ever gets back to preaching and adhering to the simple message that they used to have - one that they've previously ridden to victory on - they'd be shoe-ins in 2008. Whether or not the Republicans have cleaned their own house enough to take advantage of something like this remains to be seen.

Barack Obama is running on an economic platform that promises to "restore fairness to the tax code". On the same page of his campaign website that that quote came from, Obama also refers to Bush's "Tax Cuts for Wealthy Instead of Middle Class". Put the two of them together and the message that Obama is sending to the public is that he wants to take money from the wealthy and give to the middle class - the very definition of the "Income Redistribution" that this Gallup poll measures public opinion on. Obama doesn't even have to actively do much for this redistribution to happen - all he has to do is let the Bush tax cuts expire.

The numbers in this poll are staggering. Overall, Americans are against the core principle behind Barack Obama's domestic economic policy - income redistribution - by an astounding 84% to 13%. Republicans oppose it 90%-9%, Independents oppose it 85% to 13%, and even Democrats oppose it 77% to 19%.

Gallup has been the gold standard of polling for Democrats for decades. These days, the media is continually promoting Obama's theory of "bringing back fairness" to the tax code. In fact, the "tax fairness" war-cry has been at the core of the Democrats' message machine, and has been endlessly promoted by their minions in the media, since 2000. With those facts in mind, these particular poll results are breathtaking. To give you an idea of how important even Gallup thinks this poll is, the explanatory narrative that goes along with the results were written by Dennis Jacobe, Gallup's Chief Economist:

PRINCETON, NJ -- When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today's consumer, Americans overwhelmingly -- by 84% to 13% -- prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

Americans' lack of support for redistributing wealth to fix the economy spans political parties: Republicans (by 90% to 9%) prefer that the government focus on improving the economy, as do independents (by 85% to 13%) and Democrats (by 77% to 19%). This sentiment also extends across income groups: upper-income Americans prefer that the government focus on improving the economy and jobs by 88% to 10%, concurring with middle-income (83% to 16%) and lower-income (78% to 17%) Americans.

In this poll, Gallup also asked another question - is the government, in general, doing too much or too little? While the results on this question aren't quite as dramatic as the results on the income distribution question, the poll still shows that a majority of Americans believe that the government is doing too much (read: screwing it up) as opposed to too little.

A separate question finds Americans more likely to believe government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses (50%) as opposed to saying government should do more to solve the country's problems (43%). This broad question is not directed specifically at the economy, but reinforces the general idea that many Americans are leery of too much direct government intervention in fixing the country's problems.

Americans of all incomes, social strata, and political affiliations get it - we can't tax our way out of this, and the government isn't the right entity to save us. The Republican message to Americans - before the Congressional GOP became the party of pork, earmarks, and corruption - was to keep taxes low and focus on improving both the economy and job creation by encouraging business to do what they are designed to do and do best - employ people and make money. As for the old "limited government" question - a subject of heated debate even within the ranks of conservatives today - this poll shows that the public clearly thinks that less government is better government.

Unless I'm mistaken, all of these results show support for - dare I say it - Reagan-brand conservatism. Even after all this time - after all the liberal garbage that the Democrats and the media relentlessly shove in our faces - when the public is faced with an economic crisis, Reagan's conservative message of low taxes and limited government still wins.

This poll clearly shows that the conservative message, especially on the economy, has gotten through. What's still unclear, however, is if the current group of Republicans are the right ones to take the GOP back to majority status. The Republicans in Congress have to be united and show some guts, something that they seem reluctant to do. For instance, the report in today's New York Times on the expansion of earmarks (Earmarks Persist in Spending Bills for 2009), especially coming after the Democrats rode to victory in 2006 promising to end them, is particularly embarrassing for the GOP. A true no-brainer, an earmark moratorium by the Republicans would send out a signal of fiscal responsibility to the public during a time of economic crisis that the Democrats would never be able to match, and the media would never be able to cover up. Coupling that with a promise to submit requests for funding all future non-emergency local projects to the appropriate committees to be inserted into the appropriate bills - where they can be seen and debated by all, including the public - is a political winner. Why the Republicans haven't taken these simple steps this year is beyond my comprehension.

I don't know what else can be said to convince the GOP to take such logical actions and re-embrace their conservative values, other than to point out the fact that if this bunch of Republican Senators and Congressmen don't get it, perhaps the next bunch will...

As we read in this morning's Politico (McCain, GOP unleash anti-Obama plan) that the Right is coalescing around a unified message against Barack Obama, we simultaneously find that Obama is handing the "I'm just another politician from Chicago" issue to John McCain and the Republicans on a silver platter.

In this morning's edition of ABC News' "The Note", Rick Klein has the following to say about Barack Obama and his "evolving" positions:

Thursday's landmark Supreme Court may or may not have plopped gun control into the campaign. But it does place Sen. Barack Obama's careful, cautious, sometimes contradictory (and dare we say Clintonian?) approach to tricky policy positions squarely in the center of the race.

...Name your issue -- on trade, taxes, guns, the death penalty, campaign finance reform, FISA -- Obama may well be taking the politically smart position for a Democrat in these early days of the general election.

But the point is that he's taking positions that are at least shaded differently than those he's taken in the past, if not outright flip-flops. These are political calculations that make a dangerous assumption for Obama: that he's willing to risk being called a "politician" at all.

Obama's switch from being an "agent of change" to being an "agent of party politics and the status quo" really is remarkable. The one thing that Barack Obama has going in his favor is that as the primary season ended, most of the American public (aside from the media, political types, and their groupies) have pretty much tuned out for the summer (Gallup: Election Enthusiasm Dips After Primaries). So right now, there a better than even chance that large numbers of voters aren't aware that Obama has been flip-flopping on issues more than John Kerry ever dreamed of.

On the other hand, there's a risk for Obama if many of his supporters, especially those independents on the fence, start paying attention again to the campaign in late August only to find that the Obama of August 2008 is not the same as the Obama they thought they knew - that being the Obama of January - April 2008.

Look for the Obama campaign to work hard over the summer to cement the conventional wisdom and media meme that the Obama of "today" - on FISA, gun control, campaign finance reform, and several other issues that are popping up - is the same Obama that "we all" fell in love with over the winter.

An excellent example of certain parts of the media's complicity with Obama's plan is found in this morning's New York Times' article on the Supreme Court's Heller decision. In the 27th paragraph, Linda Greenhouse (didn't she retire?) states "Mr. Obama, who like Mr. McCain has been on record as supporting the individual-rights view, said the ruling would “provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.”". As anyone who is familiar with Obama's previous claim that the DC ban was "constitutional", this is a transparent and subtle attempt by Greenhouse to whitewash Obama's changing positions. This is how Obama and his supporters are going to try to change the public record - by injecting Obama's new positions frequently into public discussion as long-time established fact, thus creating a substantial paper trail for the "change agent" to point to as proof of his unwavering commitment to static positions on various issues - aka "the courage of his convictions".

It will be up to the Republicans and the McCain campaign to continually offer proof otherwise, creating a substantial, alternate and more accurate conventional wisdom. 

This was a line from an old Billy Joel song Miami 2017. Sadly, it accurately describes the straits of the New York State GOP.

Now, lots of folks will immediately post that this is a liberal, Democratic, Bush hating state chock full of nonwhite and nonchristian voters. Well, it wasn't Goldwater's Arizona a decade ago and the state still had a Republican Governor, a Republican senator, a Republican attorney general, and a dozen GOP congressmen.

Not to mention Giuliani was Mayor of NYC then.

So where have the mighty fallen:

a) the leader of the NY State Senate is stepping down  http://www.cbs6albany.com/news/bruno_1255832___article.html/decision_joe.html

Now Joe Bruno had been pretty much a status quo Republican over the past few terms; even opposing former Governor Pataki's budget cuts at one point. But with liberal Democrats controlling the rest of state government; status quo was actually pretty refreshing. We can thank Bruno for contributing to the self-immolation of former Governor Eliot Spitzer, for example.

Republicans are highly likely to hold Bruno's seat in the Albany suburbs but with a razor thin margin going into this election and many vulnerable incumbents, Dean Skelos's tenure as Majority Leader may be brief. http://www.wkbw.com/news/local/20747614.html

b) the Island of Lost Dreams

Staten Island's 13th Congressional District has been a Republican stronghold since the days of Reagan. It would take a political disaster for the Democrats to swing this seat. And guess what......the Republicans have had two already this year.

First, Cheato Vito Fossella's drinking and philandering render him politically toxic, so he stands down for re-election. Then ,after all the well known local officeholders passed on the race, a retired financier stepped up offering to partially self fund the race, and got the nod.

And he died

   http://www.nypost.com/seven/06242008/news/regionalnews/gop_left_in_the_lurch_on_si_116950.htm

Now there are enough registered Republicans and behavioral Republicans in this district that even one of the "nobodies" might win, since McCain is expected to carry this area. But we've taken a double whammy here.

Mike Bloomberg, who has never been accused of not having good radar for this stuff, exemplifies this. Adopting the GOP as a flag of convenience post Giuliani, he has now become quite publicly "independent".  

It's likely that in 2009 there will be no indicia of GOP control of state government,  low single digits of Republican house members out of 29, and control of no local government larger than some upstate counties.

No matter what you think of New York, this sort of weakness in the nation's third largest state--and still it's mainstream media capital--isn;t good for the party in the rest of the nation.

Looking outward, the national party may be too closely identified with southern white protestants for this electorate.

Looking inward, mushy moderate officeholders have made the local party's "brand"  hard to distinguish from the Democrats.  Weak candidate recruitment and gaffe prone campaigns haven't helped either.

If there's ever a state that desperately needs its own "Next Right", it's  New York,  Will the locals rise up, or will they huddle in the bunker or call Mayflower? 

At the heart of Barack Obama's economic proposals - those that he has promised to deliver if he becomes President - is the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts. He promises to "restore fairness to the tax code", and provide middle class tax relief. While we can all applaud the objective of more tax relief, Obama plans on 'paying' for this by allowing the Bush Tax cuts to expire - a punitive measure against the 'rich'.

Republicans, now that Lincoln Chafee is out of the party, need a unified and strong message against such a stupid move. They were handed one earlier today in the form of an interview with the Nobel prize winning economist Robert Mundell in the Wall Street Journal: An Economist Who Matters.

Mundell, Professor of Economics at Columbia University in New York, has served as an adviser to the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the European Commission, several governments in Latin America and Europe, the Federal Reserve Board, the US Treasury and the Government of Canada. He is considered to be the father of the euro - first proposing a common currency in Europe in the 70s - and won his Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1999. His world-wide credentials are impeccable.

His interview with the Wall Street Journal's Kyle Wingfield this morning is fascinating. For our purposes, let's focus on what he views as the biggest threat to the world economy at the moment - allowing the Bush Tax Cuts to expire:

Back in America, there's an election going on. There's also been a spate of financial problems, not the least of which is a weak dollar. But Mr. Mundell says "the big issue economically . . . is what's going to happen to taxes."

Democratic nominee Barack Obama regularly professes disdain for the Bush tax cuts, suggesting that those growth-spurring measures may be scrapped. "If that happens," Mr. Mundell predicts, "the U.S. will go into a big recession, a nosedive."

One of the original "supply-side" economists, he has long preached the link between tax rates and economic growth. "It's a lethal thing to suddenly raise taxes," he explains. "This would be devastating to the world economy, to the United States, and it would be, I think, political suicide" in a general election.

..."the most important thing that could be done with respect to tax rates now is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Eliminating that uncertainty would be more important than pushing for a further cut – in the income tax rates, anyway."

To a media and a general public that views the bestowing of a Nobel Prize as the ultimate in credibility, this is pretty hard stuff. Are we to believe what Nobel winner Al Gore tells us, but ignore Nobel winner Mundell?

The interview is full of other interesting observations. Mundell feels that the optimum top tax rate in the United States should be 30%, and that the corporate tax rate should be 25%. He also believes that exchange rates should be fixed, much like they were fixed under Breton Woods until Nixon. He would like to see the EU and the Federal Reserve come to some sort of an agreement to keep the euro (whose idea he originated over three decades ago) between $0.90 and $1.30. Mundell also favors making the dollar the dominant currency against which all other currency would be fixed (he feels that the euro is vastly overvalued at present).

But it's his message on the expiration of the Bush Tax cuts which is most important to us, and to the nation. It's a message that all Republicans, and anyone else interested in our economy, should offer as a constant repeated message:

"The world's pre-eminent Nobel Prize winner in Economics has just told us that if we allow the Bush Tax cuts to expire, it will immediately plunge us into a deep recession - much worse that the situation we are currently slowly crawling out of - and will be disastrous to the world's economy for years to come. That world-wide economic disaster is precisely what Barack Obama has proposed."

Obama's populist message to tax the so-called rich and cut the taxes of the middle class relies solely on age-old class envy. But his dirty little secret is that he's smart enough to know that if the so-called 'rich' don't do well, the middle class doesn't get paid - and everyone suffers. The GOP must ask people to sit back and think for a moment. To go after the 'rich' in order to punish them, be it people who make $100K, $250K, or a million dollars a year, always hurts the people whose lives depend on those 'rich' people. Those other lives consist of the middle-class people that are directly employed by the 'rich', and middle-class people who are employed by the companies that the 'rich' buy goods or services from. And how about the elderly who rely on the income from retirement funds or stock sales to live, and to help their families? They would be hurt by Obama's so-called "fairness" as well.

Obama's populist claptrap is easy to poke holes it. But the press is going to protect him as much as they can. The GOP must have a unified, consistent, and loud message on issues like taxes. That is the only way that the Republicans are going to be heard above the media by the American people.

Ah, the Democrats. They wanted to change Congress, and they have. Today's Gallup Poll shows Congress' lowest confidence level ever - at 12%. Note that this is Gallup's annual rating, not the monthly tracking update of Congressional approval:

PRINCETON, NJ -- Gallup's annual update on confidence in institutions finds just 12% of Americans expressing confidence in Congress, the lowest of the 16 institutions tested this year, and the worst rating Gallup has measured for any institution in the 35-year history of this question.

For comparison, the 2006 "Confidence in Institutions" level for Congress (when the GOP was in charge) was at 19% - considerably better than this year's figure, but still admittedly anemic.

Gallup also recently released their June 2008 approval poll, and it showed the Democratic Congress at an approval rating of 19%. Compare that with the Congressional approval numbers for the GOP controlled Congress in the June 2006 poll at 27%. Even immediately before the 2006 November elections, when the GOP got routed, the Republican-led Congress had an approval rating of 26%.

I'd also observe that in 2006, the media was working feverishly to portray the Republicans in the worst light possible. The situation is reversed this year (actually ever since the Democrats took over control of Congress in 2007). The press is doing their best to cover for the Democrats - from Barack Obama on down. And no-one has promoted a Democratic Congress more than the media.

Can the Republicans take advantage of this? Probably not with the same faces in control, unless they do something drastic over the next few months. And with the Congressional recesses and local campaigning upcoming, I'm afraid it might be too late. But these numbers do show that virtually no-one likes Congress right now - so there is still a chance. Pundits point out that along with historically low approval ratings, polls like Gallup also show that the voters still want the Democrats to lead Congress. I posit that those superficially conflicting polls are a result not of the public thinking that the Democrats "haven't had a chance to change things yet", but because the Republicans still haven't offered the public 1) evidence that they've learned their lesson, and 2) a real alternative message to the Democrats that appeals to people. To succeed, the Republicans have to offer a positive message packaged with a reminder of the Democrats' negatives.

If I were a GOP campaign, I'd use as a background picture in all of my ads one of the Democratic Leadership (Pelosi and Reid) together with the opposition's local candidate. Superimposed over the picture would be their approval numbers, the change in the price of gas from 2007 to today, figures indicating that economic growth has stagnated since the Dems were elected, etc. - creating an overall image tying the Democrats to the 'pain' Americans are going through. (God, I hate sounding Clintonian...) Depending on the development of Obama's negatives over the next few months, I'd consider adding him to the background as well - along with the liberal enemy du jour. (A perfect example of that enemy today would be Chris Dodd and Countrywide.) Make the Democrats own what's "bad" that's happening in our nation today.

The Democrats are going to try to do the same to the GOP with President Bush - use him in attack ads. That's why it's imperative for everyone in the GOP to immediately point out ad nauseum that it's the Democratic Congress that controls the country, legislation, and the purse-strings - and that by bringing up President Bush, who is not up for re-election, Democrats are ignoring the present and still fighting the past ("stuck on stupid"). Candidates should contrast that with the GOP, which is dedicated to fighting for us in the present for the future.

The GOP's job would be made manifestly easier if they'd come together on something like an immediate earmark moratorium, but that die appears to be cast already. There are issues that can be coalesced around, however. Polls show that Newt's "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" is one such winner. The Republican Study Committee and Rep. Paul Ryan have moreideas that I think would resonate, especially in Ryan's "A Roadmap for America's Future".

Do the Republicans have time to organize and really offer something concrete and different from the Democrats? I think that they do. People I talk to on a daily basis are sick and tired of politics already (especially Presidential politics). The public's ready to tune out for the summer. The next time anyone (other than political groupies, the media, and masochists) will pay a lot of attention to politics, including their local politics, is immediately after the conventions in September. That would be a great time to roll out a unified message against the Democrats.

That does mean that someone is going to have to corral the McCain campaign. He can't continue to claim that he is a conservative, and then actively throw business and conservatives under the bus with his populist rhetoric. Again, he's living in the past (like the Democrats) if he thinks that doing such things will create amore with the press. They're behind Obama now, and nothing that John McCain can do will change that. Together, we have to go over the press directly to the people to be successful. Furthermore, voters got rid of the GOP in 2006 because they felt that the Republicans were acting like Democrats, rather than acting like the Republicans they promised to be. And if a voter is given a choice between a Republican who acts like a Democrat, versus a real Democrat - they'll usually go with the Democrat.

Remember, the GOP was successful after the disaster that was Jimmy Carter and that Democratic Congress. The Democrats are offering, at the top of the ticket, another Jimmy Carter. While Barack Obama is as close as the Democrats have ever come to an orator like Ronald Reagan, after the teleprompter goes off, there's no substance. Obama has proven to be a terrible extemporaneous speaker - his campaign always has to go out and correct something contradictory that he's said. That should be pointed out by everyone in the GOP loudly and often.

Down ticket, the Democrats aren't much better. They ran on change in 2006, and it can be successfully argued that the country has gone downhill since they took over Congress. The greatest national success that we've had since the elections of 2006 is on the issue that the Republicans and the President defeated the Dems on - the Democrats' attempted surrender in the Iraq war. The Dems are fond of saying that the Republicans are embracing the "failed policies of the past". It's time for the GOP to reach out and steal that phrase - it's the Democrats who want to take us back to the "failed policies of the past". They tried to cause a Vietnam with the Iraq War, and were stopped by the Republicans. Voters like winners, not losers. Their proposals for fighting the War on Terror go back to the September 10th mindset - even Obama's just named advisers are a throwback to the Clinton Administration, which brought us 9/11. And their tax proposals are straight out of the Carter years.

This election will all depend on creating a number of simple, repeatable messages - and hammering them home over and over again. That takes coordination and teamwork. Look for no help from the press. And the Democrats will vastly outspend the Republicans from top to bottom, so it's important that the GOP spending be targeted and effective. There will be no room for mistakes.    

I was planning to do an analysis on Ohio, but after looking at Matt Hurley's post on Ohio, I realized that I couldn't really do any better than he did.  So I decided to move on and move next towards doing Michigan.

Michigan has been a state that has been tantalizing for Republicans in the past decade, but always out of reach.  In 2000, Al Gore won the state 51.3% to Bush's 46.1%.  Four years later, Bush made up a little ground, but he still trailed John Kerry by 3.5 points.  Pennsylvania and Michigan have been voting in much the same way during the last two presidential elections, with Michigan about a point more Democratic.

In the state, Michigan has been a Democratic province this decade.  Jennifer Granholm took office in 2002, and won reelection easily in 2006.  Fortunately for Republicans, Granholm's popularity has suffered due to the lackluster performance of the Michigan economy.  It's not a good sign for your political future when you are said to be presiding over a "one state recession".  Perhaps more than any other major state, in recent years Michigan has become fed up with a Democratic state government.  Michiganders are ready for change, but the change they want may be in McCain's favor, not Obama's.

Promoted and bumped. -Patrick

In the last two Presidential election cycles, Pennsylvania has been one of the most contested states.  In 2000, George W. Bush visited Pennsylvania more than any other state.  In 2004, Pennsylvania was once again a key target state.  Unfortunately for Bush, Pennsylvania did not go his way in either election.  In 2000, Al Gore beat Bush by a margin of 52% to 47.5%.  Bush got his share of the vote up to 48% in 2004, but John Kerry edged him out by two and a half percentage points.

Despite being a swing state, Pennsylvania is not similar to the rest of the nation.  Pennsylvania is the second oldest state in the nation, behind retirement haven Florida.  In some ways Pennsyvania is even older than Florida because Florida also attracts young people, whereas young people flee Pennsylvania in droves.  Pennsylvania has had some of the lowest population growth in the nation, with many areas losing population.  And despite being a northeastern state, Pennsylvania has the highest per-capita membership in the NRA in the country.