Time is short and the polls are painting a grim picture for John McCain, but top Republicans believe they still see a clear path to the White House.
“I don’t acknowledge it’s a long shot. It's a realistic shot,” said RNC deputy chairman Frank Donatelli of his candidate's prospects.
Donatelli argues that nearly every pollster has over-sampled Democrats, thus exaggerating Obama's support while understating that for McCain.
“I don’t think it’s outrageous," he said, "to think we are going to do much better with party turnout than some of the models indicate."
For that reason, Donatelli believes McCain can win all the big swing states in play: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and perhaps Pennsylvania.
He also says the public now sees Obama as not yet tested and ready for the job, and is fearful that he will increase taxes, quickly grow the federal government and forestall long-term economic growth. Voters will conclude, he says, that “liberal Democrats should not control the whole federal government.”
Donatelli said that the RNC’s internal polling now shows the race within the margin of error in key swing states, though he declined to say which ones.
“I’ve been saying for some time that from our polling I think it's much tighter, a 3-point national race on Friday,” said Ed Goes, a Republican pollster who consults with the McCain campaign. “I think this race is going to be extremely tight.”
Goes predicts, as does top McCain pollster Bill McInturff, that Obama will not significantly increase the percentage of young voters or black voters from the last election, voters they say the Democrat needs to come out in record numbers to get over the top in several crucial swing states.
Last week McInturff wrote in a memo, “All signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday.”
To win the 270 electoral votes needed to take the White House, though, McCain would have to win a string of large states that either roughly split or lean to Obama. States like Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina would have to go for McCain. McCain would also have to hold states like Missouri and Indiana, which is feasible, and win either what appears a long shot to take Pennsylvania or, for example, Colorado and Nevada.
McCain loyalists have responded to the daunting electoral math by raising the question famously posed by Hillary Clinton shortly before she took April Pennsylvania Democratic primary: “why can't [Obama] close the deal?”
McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis said Sunday on ABC News that if suburban and rural voters “haven’t bought into the Obama massage… they’re probably not gonna.”
In a conference call with reporters this weekend, Davis said, We're pretty jazzed up about what we're seeing in the movement in this election."
"We are witnessing, I believe," he said, "probably one of the greatest comebacks that you've seen since John McCain won the [Republican] primary."
If that's so, it will have been accomplished on a wave of eleventh-hour second guessing by soft-Obama supporters and a significant portion of white independents, a group polls now show leaning to Obama, returning at the voting booth to their partisan leanings in recent presidential cycles.
Thus McCain's efforts in the closing days of the campaign to paint Obama as that hoariest of political bogeymen: the tax-and–spend liberal, if not outright socialist.
And though the McCain campaign has shied away from the topic, there remains the question of whether racism has distorted the poll numbers, and will reveal itself on Election Day.
As conservative analyst Bill Kristol said on Fox News Sunday, “Obama has many paths to victory; McCain probably has only won narrow path to victory. But,” he added, “you only need one narrow path.”
Most election-watchers, though, are deeply skeptical—including some close to McCain.
“As much as I would want to see a Dewey-defeats-Truman moment, it's next to impossible for me to see how that occurs mathematically as well as organizationally,” said John Weaver, McCain’s longtime friend and ally, and the top strategist for his 2000 bid for the presidency.
When Weaver was asked if he can envision a feasible scenario that allows McCain to win, Weaver paused and responded: “Intellectually honest, no I can’t.”
