Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have already made this a historic election. Yet it may be a seminal one too, because the permafrost that has been gripping voter loyalties may be starting to thaw. In the last four presidential elections, 34 of the 50 states have voted the same way. In 2004, despite all the money and effort put in, only three states—Iowa, New Mexico and New Hampshire—went to a different party than they did in 2000.
But the Obama campaign, which has the cash to run television ads in every state, reckon they have a shot at usually safe Republican states like Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi and South Carolina. They have even set up a separate operation to campaign in the 14 safest Republican states, such as Alaska and the Dakotas, to force McCain to spend time and money shoring up his base.
In turn, McCain reckons that he can carry blue-collar industrial states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. He counts on picking up working-class voters who went for Ronald Reagan and Catholics who are socially conservative and don't like Obama's "elitist style"—that is, voters who won't find it easy to vote for a black candidate.
But the race factor cuts both ways. Last year, Obama let slip a key part of his strategy when he told an audience in New Hampshire, "I guarantee you African-American turnout, if I'm the nominee, goes up 30 per cent around the country… We're in a position to put states in play that haven't been in play since LBJ."
That kind of increase in black turnout could well tip the balance in the south. In Georgia, for example, the average Republican margin of victory in the last four presidential races has been 216,000 votes. But factor in that 30 per cent increase in the black vote, with nine out of ten of them voting Obama, and he'd win by about 80,000 votes. If he pulled off that increase across the south, he'd carry Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Virginia and Florida. That would almost certainly give him enough electoral college votes to win even if McCain took Michigan, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Ohio.
Karl Rove's people to the rescue
Four years ago, Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman of the Republican National Committee put together the most sophisticated and best-organised machine in history for what they call the ground war (as opposed to the air war on television). They targeted likely Republicans with spotty voting records and ensured that as many as possible were taken to the polls. Rove's get-out-the-vote operation signed up 1.4m volunteers, one for every 40 people who voted for Bush. On election day, they were running car pools, working in phone banks and stationed at polling stations across the country. The total turnout was 60.7 per cent, the highest since 1968, and thus Bush was re-elected.
This time, talk to Republican county chairmen and precinct veterans and they are nervous about the lack of push from McCain headquarters. Charlie Cook, one of the best independent political analysts, has noted that a party accustomed to a machine "of Prussian efficiency now senses that its presidential nominee's campaign is little more than a candidate, an airplane and a small headquarters staff."
McCain can't bring in Rove, as this would make him look like Bush Rides Again. So he's bringing in Rove's team. It started with Steve Schmidt, who ran communications for Bush-Cheney in 2004 and went on to manage Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election campaign in California. Bald and barrel-chested, he looks suitably thuggish. He'd only been on staff for a few weeks when he told McCain he was heading for defeat.
Schmidt has now pretty much taken over everything except policy planning and has brought in more of Rove's people, including Greg Jenkins from the White House staff. A former Fox TV producer, Jenkins told McCain that his speeches were a disaster on television. He forced McCain to start practising with three teleprompters so he didn't look like he was just reading the words out. He even changed the event music, from jarring techno-pop to country and western. But the Republican ground war is still a work in progress.
Obama not hard on Russia shocker
Recently, Obama has shifted toward the centre on Iraq, abortion, Israel, campaign finance, the wiretap security bill and exposing his daughters to the media. He has even slammed the liberal Democratic website MoveOn for describing David Petraeus as "General Betray Us."
Now left-wing magazine The Nation has attacked Michael McFaul, one of Obama's foreign policy team, describing him as a former Bush adviser who "if not a neoconservative, is a well-known advocate for a bare-knuckles approach toward Russia." The implication is that Obama's stance on Russia is becoming more hardline, approaching McCain's vow to expel the country from the G8.
But McFaul has never been a Bush adviser. And last year he testified to the House committee on foreign relations that he didn't advise "a return to containment or isolation of Russia" but instead creating "more permissive conditions for democratic renewal." Whoops.
