Florida a Microcosm

Florida represents a microcosm of the election race today. On September 16, three weeks ago, it seemed safely in the McCain camp. Now Obama has taken a clear and growing lead, and the Republican campaign there has grown increasingly frantic and negative. McCain simply cannot afford to lose the Sunshine State. What has gone wrong, and what are the McCain-Palin strategists doing about it?

According to the Real Clear Politics averages, McCain enjoyed his biggest lead in Florida on September 16. He had 49.8% to Obama's 43.5% that day, a 6.3% lead. Two weeks later, on the 30th, the two campaigns were in a tie at 47.0% each. Now, after one more week, Obama has the advantage 49.3% to 45.3%, a 4% edge. Perhaps most stunning was the most recent poll, a large survey of 1000 likely voters by GOP-friendly FOX News/Rasmussen published on October 5 that showed Obama up by 7%.

Obama is going up by about three tenths of a point a day while McCain is going down by about two tenths of a point a day. That other tenth, the undecideds, have been reduced from 6.7% to only 5.4%, with virtually all the switch going to Obama. What is going on?

The beginning of the plunge coincides with the bursting of the Wall Street housing bubble and the Bush-Paulson bailout proposal while McCain was saying the "fundamentals of the economy were strong." The continued erosion has encompassed the time frame of McCain's erratic and initially unsuccessful efforts to intervene in the imbroglio, and the presidential and vice presidential debates. During this interlude, McCain first appeared out of touch, then ineffectual, and finally grumpy and angry. Through all of this Obama has exuded purposeful calm. Remarkably, the Capitol Hill veteran insider was the one who came off not seeming presidential throughout. That has been problem one.

Problem two has been the resulting stock market slump. Just today the market lost another aggregate 3.58% of its value. This has an especially powerful impact in Florida, with its extraordinarily high retired population. Florida's over-65 percentage of 16.8% is by far the highest in the nation. See the census figures here. Retirees are seeing their nest eggs evaporate before their eyes and are growing increasingly alarmed.

Finally, the Obama organization's tech-savvy registration efforts are paying off. This year 250,000 new Florida Democrats have been registered compared to 98,000 Republicans. For the first time since figures have been kept, Democrats now outnumber Republicans among Florida's Hispanic population, 35.5% to 35.2%. Since 2006 Hispanic Democrats have grown by 18% and Hispanic Republicans by only 2% in the state.

So Obama is benefiting from economic worries, probably across the board but especially among seniors, and from growing support in the Hispanic community. The McCain response has been, as has been widely predicted and even telegraphed by the Republican campaign, to return to character attacks against Obama. Earlier campaigns based on deriding Obama's "celebrity," creating a stir over "lipstick on a pig" and accusing him of advocating "teaching sex to kindergartners" made initial progress but had limited shelf lives as Obama and his campaign hit back.

Today Gov. Palin brought up the William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright associations and McCain called Obama a liar. A police chief in uniform introducing McCain at a rally referred to Obama's full name, "Barack Hussein Obama" and this time McCain refused to criticize or disavow its intent, as he did earlier when a minister made a similar introduction. Obama dismissed such attacks as distractions from the issues voters care about and his campaign released a documentary they evidently had prepared for just such a case about McCain's problems with the "Keating 5" issue some years back.

We therefore see a consistent pattern. When the McCain campaign begins to falter they return to character attacks to try to level the playing field. They have provided temporary respite from the GOP's eroding fortunes, but seem, like a drug abuser's fixes, to produce less effect the more they are overused. Given the economic and interpersonal dynamics at play, it now seems unlikely these tactics will be able to accomplish the needed turnaround. McCain needs something very, very major to happen to fundamentally alter the conditions of the contest. In the meantime, we are likely to see one increasingly desperate "Hail Mary" pass after another for the next four weeks.