A dramatic spike in support for Obama

Last week, in a gun store in West Virginia, sales abruptly went through the roof. Residents had heard that ‘the Muslim’ was going to be the next president of the US and was going to ban the sale of handguns.

In Florida, a middle-aged white Obama supporter, helping to fill in an absentee ballot for his traditionally Democratic, but bigoted, 95-year-old father, tried to slip Obama past him by suggesting he tick the “straight Democratic” box. The father mumbled assent. Then, as he was leaving, the old man raised his head. “Make sure you vote for that coloured boy,” he told him.

In rural Indiana, the young po’white woman who opened the door to an Obama canvasser couldn’t say who she was voting for. “Who’re we voting for?” She called to her husband, who was watching the game. “We’re voting for the nigger!” came the reply. “We’re voting for the nigger,” the young woman obligingly told the canvasser.

Such anecdotes may be funny, but they were supported last week by a rash of polls that suggest Obama has broken away in the race for the White House. Startlingly, his dramatic spike in support is now being seen among all demographic groups, including — crucially — the over-65s, and poor white rural voters.

Quinnipiac, which put Obama ahead of McCain by 5 points in Florida, 13 in Pennsylvania and 14 in Ohio — suspiciously large margins which were, however, seconded both by Battleground Ten polls published the same day and the latest CBS/NYT poll, which gives Obama a huge 13-point lead nationally — had this to say:
“As we enter the home stretch, Senator Obama is winning voter groups that no Democrat has carried in more than four decades. If these numbers hold up, he could win the biggest Democratic landslide since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Senator Obama is winning among all age groups in all three states. He wins women by more than 20 points in Ohio and Pennsylvania and is competitive among men in all three states.

Whether voters went to college or not, they are voting for him. He also is winning Roman Catholics in those states, historically the key swing voter group in the electorate and synonymous here with the blue-collar vote.”

For what it’s worth, this columnist sees sufficient equivocation in the current flood of polls to suggest that the narrative of an impending Obama landslide may be premature. But that view is certainly bolstered by the public backbiting that’s begun in Republican ranks; by the high-profile Republican defections following Colin Powell’s last weekend; and by the number of rightwing commentators who’ve thrown in the towel. On Wednesday, eg, leading conservative columnist David Brooks predicted that Obama would win the popular vote by 9 points — a margin not seen since Ronald Reagan’s blowout of Walter Mondale in 1984.

Exit polls from several states where early voting has begun also seem to foreshadow a massive Obama victory. In Nevada’s Washoe County, eg, more residents had voted in the first six days of early voting than did in the entire 14-day early voting period in 2004; and 7,161 more Democrats had voted than Republicans. In Clark County, Democrats were outvoting Republicans by more than 2-to-1. Between them, Washoe and Clark counties accounted for 85 per cent of the state’s voters in 2004. Obama landslides in them would easily give him ‘red’ Nevada.

Likewise, in blood-red North Carolina — where earlier this year a huge African-American turnout nailed shut the coffin of Hillary Clinton’s campaign hopes — more than 481,000 ballots had been cast by Wednesday, 56 per cent of them by Democrats, compared with 27 per cent Republicans and 16 per cent Independents. African-Americans accounted for 33% of the ballots cast, though they make up only 21% of North Carolina’s voters. (Similarly, in Florida, by midweek, African-Americans had cast 21% of the ballots cast, though they make up just 13 per cent of that state’s voters.)

Michael McDonald, a voting expert at George Mason University, called the data from North Carolina “stunning.” “North Carolina is off the charts,” McDonald said.

This trend is the more noteworthy because in both 2000 and 2004 Bush won the early vote by some 20 per cent. “But what we are seeing now is that they are more African-American, Hispanic and the young,” said Paul Gronke, executive director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Oregon. “I look at this and I go, ‘Wow!’ This is quite different.”

It shouldn’t be surprising, however. McCain’s performance when the financial crisis broke was manifestly absurd, and Sarah Palin has become an albatross around his neck — even more of a turnoff to voters, by the polls, than McCain’s association with GW Bush has been. (Imagine that!) By Friday ex-Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, once a frontrunner for McCain’s Veep pick, and not a man known for talking out of turn, was allowing publicly that McCain would have had a real shot at winning his state — and thereby the election — if he, not Palin, had been McCain’s running mate.

McCain’s campaign must be the worst by a presidential candidate in living memory. After spending the past six weeks with Sarah Palin exciting his base by depicting Obama as an anti-American-Muslim-terrorist-Commie (really, no more than a version of a child’s defiant ‘Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!’), McCain last week suddenly switched to attacking GW Bush, thus deeply dismaying the same base in a spastic, eleventh-hour attempt to now court independent voters.

So: how can Obama still lose this thing?
One way is through some combination of ‘the Bradley effect’ and late Undecideds breaking heavily for McCain. If, eg, Democratic Congressman John Murtha was right when he said 10 days ago that in his rural western Virginia constituency the voters were “racist” (this column last week erroneously ascribed that remark to Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell) then the outcome of the race there — and in the Rust Belt states of Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania — will be anybody’s guess, polls notwithstanding.

And the other way is through voter fraud/suppression. Early reports of large-scale disenfranchisement of African-American and young, first-time voters on the grounds of inconsistently spelt IDs, minor clerical errors, or changes of address resulting from home foreclosures or temporary residence status in the first place — to say nothing of several reported instances in which early voters pushed the button for Obama only to see ‘McCain’ light up (this, incidentally, on the same machines deemed to have been tampered with in Ohio in 2004) — have been sufficiently widespread to cause alarm. The Democratic Party has been characteristically lethargic in policing such reports. The Obama campaign (which reportedly has 5,000 lawyers ready to fan out across the country on November 4) has had to vigilantly respond to each one on its own.

The best antidote to such concerns, of course, would be for Obama to rack up such huge margins in key battleground states that their outcome can’t be stolen or taken from him under the table. We shall see if he can do that in the nine days left in the campaign.