In battleground states, voter registration, newly eligible young voters, eligible nonvoting blacks, and even death rates all favor Obama.
These are some of the statistics which I have been warning about all year.
Much if not all of these numbers except eligible nonvoting blacks and eligible young voters should already be accounted for in the polls we are looking at. In other words, if older McCain voters have died leaving fewer of them, those numbers should already be accounted for when the pollsters analyze the field. The same is true in the opposite direction for voter registration which Beckel presumes has run in Obama's favor. I am assuming that if the pollster does not have the entire field mapped and fenced the rest of his work is nonsense.
The pollsters however have a hard time measuring intensity which is the real danger coming from nonvoting blacks who are already registered or who will be, along with eligible young voters, registered before the election.
But for the other elements which measures things as they are, much of the damage has already been baked into the cake and recorded by the pollsters.
The second general observation is that with respect to the youth vote, no campaign has succeeded in winning an election on it. Democrats are always threatening to do so. They're always disappointed. Even if many youths are registered now, history tells us that not so great a percentage will vote for Obama and that might be all the more true in today's climate given his deteriorating image.
The big danger, of course, is that registered blacks will actually come out in this election for the first time. And it is unrealistic to deny that this is a serious challenge for McCain. There is however the backlash which might or might not occur among white voters who will be energized to vote against an African-American. And there is also the factor of whites who lie about their intentions. By the time November 4 rolls around, Obama's Messiah reputation might well be in tatters by election Day and the African-American community might not be nearly so energized as Beckel thinks. On the other hand, the white "community" might well have awakened to the radical threat represented by Barak Hussein Obama.
/ To counter Beckel's arguments, one might observe that we have no way to accurately measure the intensity of the movement for Governor Palin and that is probably why Beckel attempts to dismiss it early in his piece as being by nature destined to burn out quickly.
Beckel's analysis does not weigh the relative merits of the ground games. The Republican operatives in Ohio have been quoted on these threads as saying that the Democrat ground effort there is still amateurish. We shall see.
In my judgment, if McCain can hold Ohio the pivotal battleground state becomes Colorado where the ground game becomes decisive and the black vote relatively marginalized.
There is one other potentially game altering factor: USA/Gallup has just reported that voter identification for Republicans has just pulled to within one point of voter identification for Democrats. That could very well mean that pollsters, especially Rasmussen who is assuming a 7.6% advantage to the Democrats, is greatly under reporting McCain's position. Another report simply observed that the Republicans had improved their party identification by five percentage points without identifying the baselines. This is consistent with the USA/Gallup findings. This is undoubtedly the Palin effect and it could utterly overwhelm the rest of our statistics.
As I have been saying endlessly on these threads: Tip O'Neill had it wrong, all politics is not local, in America, all politics is racial.
