Lets get real. Obama is winning.

Lets get real. Obama is winning.

Going back to the first week of 2008, the two main parties have added the following number of voters:

Democrats +184,113
Republicans +24,614

50 Days to Go and Obama Hits Back (Softly)

By Steve Lombardo

It is noon on Monday, September 15th and things are operating so quickly in the political world that major tactical--and sometimes strategic--campaign changes are happening in minutes [..]. In accordance with the new world order here is our real-time read on what is happening:

1. Obama is hitting back, and the mere act of doing so says volumes. Voters often view the candidate through the prism of the campaign he or she is running. By this measure, the last two Obama spots--an ad that attacks McCain for being tied to lobbyists and one that says he is running a negative campaign--suggest that Obama is not going to be a Michael Dukakis; it tells voters that he will punch back. It also says that Team Obama is reading the same polling we are and believes that it has to change the dynamic or this thing is lost.

2. But this Obama punch seems like a fairly weak body blow. While we think that going after McCain's strength is a good idea, we are not sure what kind of traction this lobbyist charge will get. This is, as they say, pretty "inside baseball." Also, the lobbyist attack may have a hard time sticking to McCain because it is not part of the perception package that people have of him. [..] And if you say you're going to respond to McCain's attacks with "ferocity" and that you're going to "take the gloves off," and then your first few "attack" ads are recycled messages about lobbyists and nonsense about McCain not being able to use a computer...oh boy.

3. We are in a financial meltdown (as of right now the Dow is down 250 points) and Obama is focusing on lobbyists and McCain's inability to email--this is political malpractice. There is a massive financial crisis in this country: Lehman is in bankruptcy, Merrill has been sold and AIG needs a bailout of some sort. And, to this point, we're getting nothing but "statements" from the Obama campaign. The first line of today's WSJ front page article says, "The American financial system was shaken to its core on Sunday..." Team Obama should have torn up its playbook at 5 A.M. and come out swinging with earned and paid media. One look at the results from a recent CNN poll on the most important issue facing the country, coupled with a look at the trend in consumer confidence (as reported by ABC), and an 8-year-old would be able to tell the Obama campaign where it should focus its energies.

[For graphs showing consumer confidence in the pits, and the economy being by far and away the most important issue - and being so by a rapidly increasing margin - see the original post]

4. Negative political messages must tap into a pre-existing belief. In politics, attacks only work if they ring true. It's why the McCain "Paris Hilton" ads [..] struck a nerve. We have said that the surest path to victory for Obama is to attack on the economy and the failings of the Bush administration. However, tying McCain to Bush is falling flat because it just doesn't feel right. [E]verybody knows that John McCain and George W. Bush don't much like each other and haven't seen eye-to-eye on much of anything, including the Iraq War. So tying the two together isn't working all that well. The same holds for Obama's attack on McCain as beholden to lobbyists. It just doesn't fit the frame.

[Nimh: I think the author is buying into the McCain talking points too much here: McCain is beholden to lobbyists, and he did vote with Bush most of the time and whenever it counted - especially once he had his sights on a new run again - and on Iraq he is if anything worse than Bush. But the guy's right, that's not the image people have of him. So what he says next is still true:]

If you're going to run ads that don't fit the frame, you need to launch them VERY EARLY and keep them up for months and months to try and generate some traction. So just starting with these new "hard-hitting" attacks against McCain won't work with only 50+ days left in the campaign...unless Team Obama can hit him with something that feels true.

5. The Obama campaign has been seriously off-stride. Let us count the ways:

• 1.-3. [Nimh: snipped cause I thought they were silly]
  
  
• 4. The McCain camp's relentless, timely and pointed attacks on Obama are having an effect. The movement to McCain is not just the result of a good convention and the Palin pick. The fact is, they have been hammering Obama senseless. Exhibit A: on Tuesday of last week Obama tries to change the course of the debate by making a major speech on education and attacking McCain on his record in that area. That afternoon, the McCain campaign releases a spot hammering Obama on education and saying that his only accomplishment on education was "legislation to teach comprehensive sex education to kindergarten students." While the veracity of the attack was derided, the spot got a lot of play and fit the perception of Obama.
  
  
• 5. The irony of this campaign is that an Obama team that was so adept at using the Internet to harness the online community for fundraising has been outmaneuvered by the McCain campaign in using viral videos to get its message out and win news cycles.
  
  
• 6. The early, vitriolic and often personal attacks on Palin may have inoculated her (to some extent) from the recent (and reasonable) examinations of her record. In a sense, the liberal bloggers may have done Obama more harm than good on the Palin front.

6. Obama needs to forget Palin and get back to the economy. Team Obama needs to stop going after Palin (it makes him look small, it makes him look like he's beating up on a woman, and it draws unfavorable comparisons to his own lack of experience), hammer McCain on the economy (and be very clear about what his policies will do for voters), and hammer McCain as someone who can't change a Washington culture that he's been a part of for so long (this way you're attacking McCain on his greatest strength--his "maverick-ness").

[Nimh: Bit of an inner contradiction here with point 4 -- attacking McCain as beholden to lobbyists wont fit because "it just doesn't fit the frame," but painting him as someone who's been too long part of the Washington culture will? What's the difference? Anyway, we'll cut him some slack here because of the good points he's also making.]

Current Election Environment

[Nimh: Summarising - Good news for a generic Democrat; low approval for Bush, share of people saying the country is on the wrong track is in the stratosphere. That's what the Democratic candidate should be able to capitalise on.]

LCG Regression Analysis - Vote Projectionis

As we said last week, each candidate got some bounce out of his convention. However, as our regression model shows, McCain's bounce was greater.
There are too few cases in either convention bounce period to compute a line that captures each candidate's convention swing; there just aren't enough polls for a model like that to be significant. What the below line is basically saying is this: Obama had his bounce, McCain has had his bounce, and the two bounces counterbalanced each other but momentum is on McCain's side coming out of the convention period. If this trend continues he wins by +2.3 on Election Day. [..]

[graph in original item]

Great - just what the Democrats need. Boastful pride about how "we're winning".

You dont need confident boasts, you need hardnosed realism and vigilance.

the difference between the two is rather you (yeah I mean you) keep donating and volunteering.