This was billed as a transformative election, and with a minority candidate heading one ticket and a woman running-mate on the other, it certainly is. But from now until 4th November, it will also be just like every other election—that is, all about money, organisation and the swing states. Almost unbelievably, the Republicans seem to have overcome the curse of Bush, $4-a-gallon gasoline and the looming recession to make a race of it. Sarah Palin has replaced Barack Obama as the thrilling new face, mooseburgers are in vogue, and Joe Biden is already saying that Hillary Clinton might have been a better choice for the Democratic VP slot.
But inside the Obama campaign, Jason Green and Anna Burger are refusing to panic. Green, 27, runs Obama's national voter registration scheme and has put together a 368-page manual on how to register new voters, stay in touch with them and get them to the polls. Burger chairs Obama's "Vote for Change" drive. The result of their work is that in Pennsylvania, which Obama needs to win, the Democrats have added 375,000 voters since 2006 while the Republicans have lost 117,000. Similarly, the Democrats have added 167,000 voters in North Carolina, while the Republicans have added 36,000. Overall, more than 3.5m new voters have been registered in the 17 states targeted by the Obama campaign.
Four years ago, Kerry lost Ohio by 120,000 votes. Obama's volunteers have registered over 150,000 new voters in the state, and got their mobile numbers and email addresses. Young people and minorities are the targets, not only because they lean to Obama but because they are least likely to be registered to vote. Obama, who ran a highly successful voter registration drive in Chicago as a community organiser in 1992, has always believed this can make all the difference.
The Democrats' women problem
These numbers look good for Obama, but problems remain. Take Florida. Green and Burger identified 600,000 African-Americans and 900,000 under-29s in the state who did not vote in 2004, when Bush beat Kerry by 381,000 votes. But actual registrations for Obama are lagging; the latest state figures for this year show a net pickup of only 24,000 for Democrats and 88,000 for independents.
And then there's the female vote. As a whole, women have tended to vote Democratic. But white and married women vote Republican. Four years ago, exit poll data suggested Bush beat Kerry by 11 percentage points among white women. In the week after the Republican convention, a Washington Post/ABC poll found that white women preferred McCain by 53-41. Two weeks before, they went for Obama by 50-42. This suggests that Palin is having a big impact.
President… Pelosi?
Both campaigns have been splurging money on adverts in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. That's because this year, as many as one vote in three is expected to be cast early, with some polls in those states opening in September.
Obama has spent over $10m on television ads in Virginia and Pennsylvania. But despite him spending $7m in Florida over the summer while McCain spent nothing, McCain has kept his lead in the state polls. At the end of August, Obama cut his spend in Florida and stopped the ads in Georgia and North Carolina, suggesting that he no longer thinks the black vote can win him the south.
His new strategy is probably to win all the states that Kerry won plus New Mexico and Iowa, which would leave him with 264 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to take the election. The remaining six could come from victory in Colorado, Indiana, Ohio or Virginia.
But because two states—Maine (four votes) and Nebraska (five)—assign their electoral college votes in proportion to votes cast, it is possible that the election could result in a tie, with each candidate on 269 votes. In this case the decision would go to the House of Representatives, where the delegation from each state gets one vote. If this resulted in another tie, the choice would go to the Senate. But in this instance, the constitution says Dick Cheney would no longer have his tie-breaking vote, and Joe Lieberman would vote for McCain, which means a tie would be the likely outcome. In that case, the Speaker of the House gets the nod—and President Nancy Pelosi would be sworn in.
Ickes's detailed database
Much of the detailed electoral roll data on which Obama's team depends comes from a private company called Catalist, founded by Hillary's devoted supporter Harold Ickes, with money from, among others, George Soros. Ickes reckons that Republicans won the last two presidential elections using their own state-of-the-art database, and he had doubts over whether Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee could compete.
Catalist grew out of two organisations Ickes ran in the 2004 campaign, America Coming Together and Media Fund. The Federal Election Commission fined the groups $1.35m for pursuing campaign activities without registering as political action committees. There's something for Catalist to avoid.
