I don’t think the guys at Classical Values are alone. I get the feeling that the more folks on the right see the vulnerabilities of Barack Obama, they begin to wonder if he’s even more beatable than Hillary.
Which is one of the reasons I’m not that worried about these new polls from SurveyUSA, doing a state-by-state electoral map breakdown. (Kudos to them, by the way; this is crack for political junkies.) They put Obama ahead of McCain, 280 electoral votes to 256, and Hillary ahead of McCain, 276 electoral votes to 262.
If you told me that McCain would carry New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as he does in the matchup against Obama, I would have said there’s no way the GOP candidate loses. If you had told me McCain carries Michigan, Washington and Oregon, as he does against Hillary, I would have said it’s a GOP landslide.
Against Hillary in this survey, McCain loses previously red states Ohio, West Virginia (boy, those white working-class voters must love her right now), Florida, Arkansas, and New Mexico. The poll has Hillary winning New Mexico by less than one percent; flip that and she’d down to 271. (McCain’s lead in Michigan is also less than one percent.) The poll has Hillary winning Pennsylvania by one percent (!), and she’s up 51 percent to 42 percent in Florida, which is quite different from other recent polls. (Last month Rasmussen had McCain winning the state big against either Democrat.) Flip Pennsylvania or Florida (paging Vice President Crist) and McCain wins easily.
Against Obama, McCain loses previously red states Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, two electoral votes out of Nebraska (!?), North Dakota (?!?), Iowa, Ohio, and Virginia. But notice they have Obama carrying Michigan by one percent over Obama (a result that surprises the heck out of me) and if that state flips, McCain wins the presidency, 275 to 263.
But these numbers will change between now and November. John McCain, having been in the news pretty consistently for every week since 1999, is a known quantity to most Americans. Hillary Clinton, for that matter, has been in the headlines since 1992. She’s a known quantity.
But I suspect most Americans have heard little negative information about Obama.