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Is it over?
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Ed Rollins, the respected Republican political operative, thinks this thing is over. Barrack Obama will win, Rollins said on CNN the other evening, and if there’s anything John McCain can do about it, he isn’t doing it.
Three weeks is a long time in politics. Strange things have happened before, and could again, so maybe Rollins is wrong. But there’s precious little evidence that he is.
Just consider the polling. Yeah, polling is imprecise and it’s a snapshot rather than a prediction and all those caveats. They’re all true, but the numbers are striking, perhaps deceptively so because there was no obvious, dramatic, swing.
What there has been is a slow but steady gain for Obama, who almost every other day inches another percentage point or two ahead of McCain. As last week started, he was eight points ahead in the Gallup tracking poll. At week’s end, his lead was 10 points. The other polls showed a similar trend.
Yes, all this is within the margin of error, and could be statistical “noise” reflecting no shift of opinion whatever.
But probably not, not when all the surveys go the same way. Especially not when the polling in almost all the “battleground” states puts Obama ahead, in some cases far ahead.
Then there is Gov. Sarah Palin’s scheduled Sunday bus trip in West Virginia, which George Bush carried handily in both 2000 and 2004, but where one poll actually put Obama two points ahead of McCain.
Only the most optimistic—if not downright Pollyannaish—Democrat thinks Barack Obama will carry West Virginia. But think of this: He’s now way ahead in Pennsylvania, meaning he must have made some headway among those rural southern Pennsylvanians who live, work, and vote rather like their counterparts (sometimes their relatives) in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, southern Ohio and Indiana.
Oversimplifying a bit (because there are all sorts of folks everywhere) these are voters who live in rural areas or smallish cities, who did or still do work in coal mines and paper mills, small farms and the stores that supply them. They tend to be less educated and less affluent than the people in the larger metropolitan areas. Putting it gently, they seemed to have some discomfort with the idea of a president who was not a white guy.
If Obama—and the threat of an economic disaster—has persuaded enough of them to vote for him to convince the McCain campaign to dispatch Palin to West Virginia for a day, Ed Rollins, good Republican that he is, might be righter than he wants to be.
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