Posted on 11/02/2008 7:18:33 AM PST by Dubya-M-DeesWent2SyriaStupid!
Down to the wire, Va. still too close to call, poll shows
The survey of 625 likely voters in Virginia found 47 percent supported Obama, 44 percent preferred McCain and 9 percent were undecided. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Swing state
Should Virginia vote Democratic, Barack Obama probably will win the White House. But should McCain hold the state, the result could portend a McCain comeback nationally.
The earliest signs of who will be the next president might spring from Virginia and how undecided white voters such as John Morris and Sidney Blankenbeckler cast their ballots.
"I'm pretty disappointed in Republicans right now, and I don't think John McCain is offering a lot that's new," said Morris, a retired Navy captain who lives in Chesterfield County, a prosperous Richmond suburb. "But frankly, I'm scared of Obama and some of the things he's been talking about."
Three hundred miles west, in tiny Sugar Grove, a farming and manufacturing community deep in the Appalachians, Blankenbeckler worries that a McCain victory would mean "four more years of kind of dragging along" but that Obama might be "borderline Socialist." Blankenbeckler said he is trying to decide "which is least worst."
Virginia will be among the first states to report results Tuesday night, and should it vote Democratic for the first time in a presidential race since 1964 - as many polls suggest - Barack Obama probably will win the White House. But should McCain hold the state, the result could portend a McCain comeback nationally.
A new poll commissioned by The Virginian-Pilot concludes the state remains up for grabs. The survey of 625 likely voters found 47 percent supported Obama, 44 percent preferred McCain and a crucial 9 percent were undecided. Because the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, the race is technically a dead heat.
The telephone survey was conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. on Wednesday and Thursday.
J. Bradford Coker, who oversaw the survey, said the ultimate outcome in Virginia and elsewhere might hinge on whether undecided white voters are willing to vote for Obama, who would be the nation's first African American president.
The Mason-Dixon poll shows that 11 percent of whites are undecided - far more than usual in the closing week of a statewide election, Coker said. The last time the figure was nearly as high was 1989 in Virginia, when Democrat Doug Wilder was elected the nation's first black governor.
Like Obama, Wilder had a small but clear lead in late polls. But on election night, in a phenomenon that came to be known in Virginia as "the Wilder effect," an unexpectedly large Republican vote in predominately white precincts brought GOP nominee Marshall Coleman within a whisker - four-tenths of 1 percentage point - of victory.
Coker said "almost all" of the undecided white voters broke for Coleman on Election Day; a similar break this year could deliver Virginia's 13 electoral votes to McCain.
The same phenomenon occurred in North Carolina's 1990 U.S. Senate race. Democrat Harvey Gantt, an African American, led by 4 percentage points in the final poll only to lose by 6 points on Election Day to Republican Jesse Helms.
"The million-dollar question is whether there will be a Wilder/Gantt effect in the 2008 presidential race," Coker said. "No matter what anyone theorizes, the answer today is that no one knows for sure."
In addition to Virginia, Coker said, the effect could tilt the scales to McCain in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, said he normally expects about a 2 percent dip in white support for a black candidate on Election Day - not enough, he predicted, to tilt victory to McCain nationally or in Virginia.
And Obama's campaign might have insulated its candidate against any drop-off in white support, Sabato said, by registering millions of new voters in minority communities and college towns across the nation where the Democratic nominee appears especially popular.
Obama's strategists dispute the notion of a gap between the Illinois senator's white support in polls and in actual voting. Surveys accurately predicted the votes Obama received in most of the presidential primary elections earlier this year, they note, and Obama split the white vote evenly with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in Virginia's Democratic primary.
Other analysts note that Virginia's electorate today is a considerably different from 1989, largely because of explosive growth in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and an influx of immigrants.
Bob Holsworth, a political scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, said he expects that highly motivated black voters and mostly Latino immigrants unhappy with GOP calls for tighter immigration laws will produce a 65,000-vote margin for Obama in Northern Virginia, more than double the advantage that Democrat John Kerry enjoyed there in 2004.
Holsworth said Obama also might benefit from having taken time to "become a familiar face" to Virginians. While other Democratic presidential candidates have tended to give up early on Virginia, Obama has shown up early and often - going to party functions and stumping for Virginia Democrats such as Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and Sen. Jim Webb before he was running himself.
Whatever the impact of race, Obama clearly is benefiting from President Bush's unpopularity in Virginia and around the nation. McCain has been cast as an heir to Bush "and he gets tarred with that brush," said U.S. Rep. Tom Davis, a Fairfax County Republican who is giving up his congressional seat and worries that it, too, will slip into Democratic hands.
Obama approaches Election Day with an overwhelming money advantage over McCain, stemming from his decision to for go federal financing of his campaign and raise cash on his own. As a result, Obama has opened 50 campaign offices around Virginia and has outspent McCain on broadcast advertising by more than 3-to-1.
The Mason-Dixon poll shows Obama with a 61 percent to 31 percent lead in populous Northern Virginia and a 50 percent to 40 percent lead in Hampton Roads. McCain is ahead in all other regions.
Among whites, McCain holds a 53 percent to 36 percent lead. Among blacks, Obama has a 92 percent to 5 percent advantage.
Each campaign boasts an army of more than 10,000 volunteers to lead what it predicts will be an unprecedented get-out-the-vote effort on Tuesday.
"I've never seen anything like this," said Del. Kenneth Melvin, D-Portsmouth, who supports Obama. "It's incredible. There's electricity in the air."
Morton Blackwell, one of the state's two representatives on the Republican National Committee, said, "I can tell you that many conservative interest groups out there are not sitting on their hands in this election."
Blackwell identified organizations that are pro-gun rights, anti-abortion and anti-union and added that if it were not for the selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate, "a lot of these conservative interest groups would not be involved."
Have you suffered some sort of brain damaging accident that I should know about? I just got done telling you that McCain's primary task is to hold every red state and Obama's primary task is to take a red state away. If their positions were reversed, they would probably still be in the same states as Obama tried to pull an upset in a red state.
It's like an NFL team that has a slight lead going into the last few minutes of the fourth quarter. If they have the ball, they're not going to start throwing a lot of long balls. Oh, they'll go for a touchdown or field goal if they can take it, but if they have a choice between a fierce but risky attack and protecting the ball and running the clock out, they'll be on defense while on offense.
As the Republican, McCain has a batch of red states that already add up to more than 270, and he has an energized base. Even if his internals showed him up by 5 or so, he'd be an idiot to try to take away some blue states. Pennsylvania is the possibility of a rushing touchdown to put the game away.
Got it now?
Wait...what? No answer? No rebuttal telling me why McCain should be trying to take California or Delaware instead of focusing on the states that gave the Republican his victory in the last two elections?
Gee...I wonder why. Maybe it’s because I’m right.
Nahhhh...
Oh, and as for your repeated mantra about how people thought the polls were accurate when McCain was up and they’re crap when McCain is down...
Oops. Oh wait, you’ll say I cherry-picked that poll. Never mind...
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