First, we should think about these elections as taking place within the Electoral College. That means that we are dealing with 50 individual state elections. When the election contest is viewed geographically, our prospects are less sanguine than many cancer victims'. Briefly, we lost virtually every key senatorial contests in the last election in places where we should have won and, more importantly, in places where we must win if we are to take the White House. We lost in Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Florida. If we lose any one of these states, we cannot have the White House. If you think it is likely that we will take all of the states, reflect that we even lost Montana!
After one applies a geographic grid to an analysis of the election, one does not get to the issue of issues until after one grapples with the real driver of American election results: race. Nothing is going to crack Obama's 90 plus percent hold on black America. He will get 98% of the largest black turnout ever. He is likely to get a majority of Hispanic votes which now exceed in number the African-American electorate. Since Obama is doing very well among elites, especially university and post-university educated elites, he will do very well in the Jewish electorate. So, on election morning, John McCain will wake up confronted with a wall of ethnicity over which he must climb. Add to that, the probability that most females will vote Democrat this year, and Obama will not even need the gays. Some of us are old enough to recall the days of Barry Goldwater and the talk of "white backlash." Any Republican candidate who relies on white people voting their race is doomed to lose. What percentage of white males must John McCain persuade in order to overcome these odds? In my judgment, whatever it is, it is beyond the realm of rational expectation. Now we can turn to the issues for these issues that McCain must try to pry apart the overwhelming superiority enjoyed by Obama in registration, new registration, money, and monolithic mainstream media support. Seems to me that there will be two issues: the economy and the war and probably in that order unless the economy improves more rapidly than anyone who ought to know has publicly stated. We can argue all day long that the economy should be blamed on the Democrat Congress (in fact I have been posting so for years on these threads and I have been railing especially about the appalling failure of the Bush administration to expose the Democrats' slavish pandering to the environmentalists as a significant cause of our gasoline prices) but the simple fact is that the truth of the matter is that this will be the Bush economy. It will be very difficult for a Republican presidential candidate to walk away from a Republican president's economy.
The second issue is the war. Even if you accept the arguments voiced on these threads that a majority of the American people are against precipitate withdrawal, there is very little evidence they will vote to keep the boys in Iraq. There is very little evidence that the public has great intensity in that belief. In my judgment, the country at his about had it with the war and will vote against the Republicans as a way of disposing of it from their consciousness. If I am wrong, I have to be very, very wrong indeed for McCain's position on the war to overcome his wall of difficulties which I have described above.
