McCain's 10-Day Plan

[Richard Tafoya]

Note: If you haven't spent any time at fivethirtyeight.com, there is some great poll analysis going on over there. Nate Silver and his team are putting a different kind of lens on the numbers, using projection models calibrated against past voting activity and several other factors, more like the models used in analyzing professional sports match-ups.

Five Thirty-Eight:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/mccains-10-day-plan.html

In an article for the New York Post (http://www.nypost.com/seven/10252008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/mccains__long__road_to_electoral_win_135233.htm), I give it the old college try and lay out an electoral strategy for John McCain to maximize his (slim) chances of winning.

No razzle-dazzle here: McCain simply has to pick which states he and Sarah Palin can do the most good in, and hope for the best.

I group the states into four categories. The first two categories concern blue states won by John Kerry and/or Al Gore. The latter two concern red states.

1. Give-Ups. McCain should concede Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.

2. Offensive Targets. McCain should remain engaged in New Hampshire and New Mexico.

3. Defensive Targets. Some reasonably vigorous defense is required in Viginia, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio and North Carolina.

4. Gambles. McCain should limit his activity in Florida, Missouri and Indiana, and hope a national surge of some kind brings those states back into his column.

For the rationale behind these groupings, please see the full text (http://www.nypost.com/seven/10252008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/mccains__long__road_to_electoral_win_135233.htm) of the article.

[DoubleEdgeSword]

This group gives the Democrats only a little more than a 30% chance of reaching that golden number of 60 seats in the Senate. They predict Dole will lose her seat and Franken will win in Minn. Hmm.

Interesting site. Thanks, Richard.

[Murrican]

The title is, of course, misleading. The content is what someone says McCain should do. But this person doesn't have the polling McCain's team has, and has an obvious bias: "And now, he and Sarah Palin are jetting all around the country like chickens with their heads cut off - falling into exactly the trap that the Obama campaign set for them."

Pretty strong stuff. One could say the same about Biden and Obama. It would be equally inappropriate.

I doubt Nate Silver has ever been involved in any campaign. He's not a pollster but uses a mish-mash of polls which each have their own methodologies. But his analysis is at times simplistic, ignores current trendlines, and refers to primaries as though nothing has happened since (it would be like using the week after the Republican convention as a reference of merit).

Of course you compete where you can win, where the electoral votes are, and where you have a ground game. Silver has an ability to state the obvious.

But tossing Pennsylvania, full of electoral college votes, overboard, makes no sense. Unless you ignore everything that's happened since 'Joe the Plumber' and John 'Loose Lips' Murtha. The efforts in south west Pennsylvania also impact Ohio.

There are hints of seismic vote shifts, lots of 3rd-party advertising starting to avalanche onto the electoral highway, and early, brutal winter weather battering battleground states in the next few days. Media bias (either way) may be disguising or amplifying what's happening, but the polls are moving, we can see that. I think we can better gauge where the fights are by where the candidates are. And their messaging.

[Richard Tafoya]

More on Nate Silver here:
http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/
The site earned some national recognition back in May, during the Democratic primaries, when almost every other commentator was celebrating Hillary Clinton’s resurgent momentum. Reading the polls, most pundits predicted she’d win Indiana by five points and noted she’d narrowed the gap with Obama in North Carolina to just eight.

Silver, who was writing anonymously as “Poblano” and receiving about 800 visits a day, disagreed with this consensus. He’d broken the numbers down demographically and come up with a much less encouraging outcome for Clinton: a two-point squeaker in Indiana, and a seventeen-point drubbing in North Carolina. On the night of the primaries, Clinton took Indiana by one and lost North Carolina by fifteen. The national pundits were doubly shocked: one, because the results were so divergent from the polls, and two, because some guy named after a chili pepper had predicted the outcome better than anyone else.

[Murrican]

Silver broke it down the way top pollsters claim to do it. Bigger question is why they haven't been doing that, especially if he is using their publicly available numbers.

Numbers are not value-free, however, so pure statistical analysis has its achilles heels. They are snapshots of extracted numbers, not calculus-analyzed pictures of moving targets with intensity-rich content.

However, if he is doing better with pollsters' own data, than they are, it sure casts doubt on the in-house analysts' capabilities.

And, I'll re-consider somewhat my criticism on the statements in his Daily News article as they may have been presented to establish context to a broader audience, and/or edited by the newspaper's editors to add that context. That's a price you pay when you're a freelance writer...