Buy High, Sell Low

[koganbot]

Strange that stock investors seem to be reacting to news that confirms that we're in a recession. Did anyone who pays attention to the economy think that we weren't in one? I wish I had money to invest and enough cushion to sit on my investments, on the assumption that what I buy will be higher in five years.

I live in Colorado, a battleground state, so I've been getting at least one anti-Obama robocall a day from the Republicans; a week ago the theme was that he hangs with terrorists, now it's his inexperience, and of course every few days it's that he's going to raise taxes. Interesting, though: a month ago I was getting a lot of anti-Udall robocalls - Mark Udall being the Democrat running for Senate - mainly about his nefarious plans for spending my money, but those calls have disappeared. Perhaps the anti-Udall money has simply shifted to television. But I'm also wondering if the Republicans have conceded the Senate seat while still thinking the presidential run is in play.* There've been stories of the McCain campaign pulling out of the TV market here, but McCain will be in my city today, and my guess is that even if he's drastically cutting back in Colorado, he doesn't want to make it appear as if he's giving up on any more states.

Obama is being kind of a shithead too, by the way. His anti-McCain sound bites have been that McCain wants to cut taxes on companies that are sending our jobs overseas. The first half of that message is OK, but the second half, about jobs being sent overseas, is irrelevant. I mean, the McCain plain doesn't specifically give extra tax breaks to firms that outsource overseas, does it? (I haven't actually read his plan, if such a thing as a "plan" even exists beyond "I will extend the Bush tax cuts and cut capital gains." I don't know. I'm not actually a well-informed voter.)

I have no expertise when it comes to opinion polls, but based on what I've read from people who sound like they do, here's the situation: if Obama wins all Kerry states plus Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado, he's won, no matter what happens in the tighter states. Or if he loses New Mexico and Colorado but wins Virginia, he's won. All of these are likely to go to Obama, with Virginia and Colorado being the most vulnerable (FiveThirtyEight projects him up in Virginia by 6.8% and in Colorado by 6.3%). I do worry about the fact that Colorado's Republican Secretary of State purged thousands of voters from the voter rolls, some of the purgings being illegal according to the New York Times, but I assume Obama's lead and the number of people he has on the ground to contest the purgings will overcome that, as will the fact of so much early voting here (if you try to vote in advance and find you've been purged, you've got extra time to do something about it).

Anyway, taking both Kogan states (I live in Colorado and my brother lives in Virginia) would be a daunting task for McCain, and it seems likely that this is not going to be his focus, even though, as I said, he'll be in Denver today. But where he does seem to be pushing hard is in Pennsylvania, one of the Kerry states. This would appear to be an even longer shot - FiveThirtyEight puts Obama up by 10.7%. Throwing resources at this state would seem suicidal. But I've read some interesting and nonridiculous rationales for why McCain's doing it. One would be that he needs to energize his campaign, so saying, "Look, taking every single state that's been touted as swing isn't our only path to the White House, since we think we can take this one." Knock down the idea of Obama inevitability. Second is that maybe some of his own polls show the state tighter than the publicized ones do. Third is that the primary showed Obama vulnerable among white working-class Democrats, especially in the western section of the state. And fourth, Pennsylvania, unlike Colorado and Virginia, has almost no early voting; to get an absentee ballot you've got to show that you genuinely need one. So if you're McCain you've got more potential voters in play up until November 4, hence more time to swing them. He can figure that the three-and-a-half point further behind he is in Pennsylvania than in Colorado is more than compensated for by the fact that he's got more of a chance to gain ground in Pennsylvania - a population more vulnerable to his appeal, with few of the voters preempted by already having voted. (I read an estimate that said something like half of Colorado's votes will already be cast before election day.)

So, let's expect the following. McCain runs hard in Pennsylvania, with racially and culturally coded references to the fact that "Obama just isn't like us" and "He doesn't see the country in the way that we do." Now, indications are that such appeals have backfired so far overall, but if you target them to a narrow enough group of voters, maybe you've got a chance to sway those particular voters, not to mention their near neighbors in Ohio. OK, I really doubt that this strategy is going to work, but let's say it does. McCain lets Virginia and Colorado go but wins Pennsylvania and all the Eastern tossup states (Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Florida).

OK, remember what I said a couple of weeks ago, about how in this Internet and 24-Hour News Age, what happens in western Pennsylvania doesn't stay in western Pennsylvania. An appeal with a racial tinge will get out beyond its target audience, but this won't necessarily hurt McCain in the Eastern tossup states. (Well, I think it will, actually, but for this scenario to work we've got to assume that it will help him more than hurt him.) OK, but what about the Western tossup state? By which I mean Nevada. (If North Dakota or Montana ends up being a tossup state, then lets face it, McCain is being swamped and it's all over.) Now, I don't know Nevada, even though I sometimes write for a Nevada publication. But having lived a decade in Colorado, I do have this sense of how things might be. Among undecided voters, you're going to have a lot of registered independents with libertarian leanings who have trended Republican in national elections but are not happy with the party's totalitarian and big-spending impulses under Bush. And you'll have conservative-leaning Hispanics who nonetheless don't trust the Republican Party in its attitudes towards Hispanics (though I must say that this is one issue where you can't put too much blame on McCain and Bush, both of whom have tried to be somewhat reasonable on immigration). And you'll have Mormon/LDS and evangelical Christians who are social conservatives on, say, abortion but not on issues such as poverty and race. I don't know if there are a lot of these, but those who are undecided are likely to be the ones who like the fact that Obama is a Christian who talks about reaching across social barriers. And they won't hold his being black against him in the least, any more than Jesus would. Again being someone who's never been to Nevada, my impression nonetheless is that black-white isn't a big issue, that there aren't a lot of blacks and that fear of black culture and black crime isn't what makes Nevada politics run. And Nevada can elect Democrats, e.g. Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.

So, what happens in western Pennsylvania doesn't stay in western Pennsylvania, in fact makes it to Vegas etc. And I'm surmising - hoping - that it hurts McCain there.

OK, here's the electoral vote if McCain takes Pennsylvania plus the eastern tossup states but loses Virginia and Colorado (and Iowa and New Mexico, which he's almost sure to): McCain 268 to Obama 265 with 5 electoral votes left up for grabs in the western tossup state of Nevada. If Obama takes Nevada, he's won, 270 to 268. Right now FiveThirtyEight is projecting Obama plus 2% in Nevada. (Also shows him about that much ahead or more in all the tossup states not counting North Dakota and Montana, but that's a different story. RealClearPolitics has Obama plus 3.3% in Nevada. Not totally sure what those numbers mean. FiveThirtyEight has a "snapshot" number of Obama up by 3.6%, and I'm guessing that that's the number they're getting if the election were held today, but that they work in some other assumptions to make their projection of 2%, possibly going on how much past elections have tended to tighten near the end.)

Not that I expect this scenario to happen. I don't see how McCain makes up 11 points in Pennsylvania in eleven days (or even, say, 5 points in eleven days, if the race is closer than the polls show) when he's not been gaining in the last month. But if an inordinate amount of campaign dollars starts pouring into Nevada, which has a relatively small population and few electoral votes, this scenario might be why.

NEWSFLASH: I just got my first Democratic robocall, from Senator Ken Salazar, asking me to vote no on some ballot initiatives I've as of yet paid no attention to.

*FiveThirtyEight has Udall ahead by 8.8 and Obama ahead by 6.3, which isn't that big a difference.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

A lot of people have mentioned this already, but (1) the Bradley effect may not have been a factor even with Bradley (poor polling and a much tighter race than this) and (2) there are a ton of reasons for people who wouldn't vote for Obama to give aside from his race if they were so inclined. I'm optimistic enough to think that there really are far fewer people who actually, deeply care about his race anyway, but even given there ARE enough people to make a difference, they still probably wouldn't be reporting Obama, they'd say McCain and give a reason other than race.