Has Obama Won the Center? [UPDATED]

Whether or not you agree with the characterization of Barack Obama as a rootin' tootin', no good flip-flopper, bear the following in mind: all else being equal, a politician can expect to be punished if he changes his positions. Therefore, a politician will only change positions if the benefits outweigh the consequences.

Rasmussen has some new numbers out that suggest that Obama may indeed be reaping the benefits. In June, 26 percent of likely voters viewed McCain as a moderate versus 22 percent for Obama. But now, those numbers have -- flip-flopped. Obama is now seen as a moderate by 27 percent of voters, versus 23 percent for McCain.

The salient fact here is not necessarily that Obama is perceived as more moderate than he once was; that's pretty much what you'd expect. Rather, it's that he's somehow managed to make McCain seem more conservative. Presently, 28 percent of voters describe McCain as Very Conservative, whereas only 19 percent did a month ago. It may be the case that the McCain campaign's inability to define their candidate has left him relatively unable to carve out his own ground; voters are defining him solely in relation to Barack Obama.

What makes these numbers especially tricky for McCain is that he had shifted rightward during the primaries -- and has continued to do so to a certain extent in the general election campaign, with positions like his call for offshore drilling. If he were to attempt to move to the center now, that would not merely be a flip-flop; it would be a flip-flop squared.

There are still a few other cards the Republicans have left to play; their 527's, for instance, will do everything in their power to see that Obama is not able to maintain a perception as a moderate. Even so, having ceded the center ground, McCain might not find it easy to get it back. What I'd find particularly exasperating about all of this if I were a Republican donor is that McCain had the first-mover advantage, having finished his primary months ahead of Barack Obama's. Instead of using that time to preempt an Obama move to the center, he failed to do much of anything in particular. Nor, it seems, has his maverick brand been as rainproof as it was made out to be.

UPDATE: It's rare that I find myself in disagreement with Chris Bowers, but very briefly:

(i) I'm not sure that Obama's numbers aren't improving. It's hard to tell exactly because we've gone three or four days without much polling, and before that we were getting a weird mix of polls from the South and the Northeast that might not tell us much about what the rest of the country is thinking. But our tracking chart does show Obama having gained another point or two after what had looked to be a plateau.

(ii) I'd think the downside of a change in positions will tend to be frontloaded relative to the upside. Obama has gotten some very harsh media narrative out of this, but it hasn't cost him anything in the polls and he may actually be gaining [see (i)]. I'm prepared to be wrong -- maybe the flip-flop label sticks and the moderate label doesn't. But that's not my gut reaction. We'll see.

(iii) Finally, as I argued last week, I don't think this is necessarily a strategy designed to maximize one's number of electoral votes, but rather one's chances of winning the majority of them. This is a risk-averse maneuver, designed to blockade McCain from certain tactical options that he might have wished to take later on.

I also think that in some ways, this has ricocheted a bit on McCain, not precisely in recalling his own flip-flops but revealing a candidate who had yet to stake out any ground of his own. Imagine if McCain hadn't pandered away from some of his more moderate positions during the primaries -- then Obama might be in trouble. But also, in that universe, I'm not sure that Obama would have played his hand this way.

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Steve Schmidt Gets It

Whether it's related to the McCain team's shake-and-bake or not I don't know, but tonight comes word that McCain is purchasing ad time in Virginia. Halperin puts the media CW thusly:

"Suggests the McCain camp could be worried Obama has a shot in the historically Red state"

The McCain camp could be worried that Obama has a shot? I could be worried that I'll have to pay taxes next year. Obama leads in all three recent public polls of the state (albeit by tiny margins). The state has a popular Democratic governor and a popular Democratic senator, and will soon have a second, because the best candidate the GOP could recruit against Mark Warner was Jim Gilmore, who was last seen sitting at the Tancredo/Brownback table at the Republican Debate afterparty. The good thing about a staff shake-up is that it can give you an excuse to swallow your pride and do some things that an underdog needs to do -- like playing defense in Virginia.

EDIT: After reading Jonathan Martin's description of the McCain campaign's shake-up, it's a bit harder to attribute this decision specifically to Schmidt, since the official line out of Crystral City is that Schmidt is responsible for communications and message control, while Rick Davis retains responsibility for strategy. That may be being said out of politeness to Davis, though. At the very least, there was a certain nonchalance in the way that Davis had been handling the campaign that this decision marks a reversal from.

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The Electric Minor Political Scandal Acid Test

Newsweek reports that the McCains did not pay taxes for four years on a piece of San Diego beachfront property. Is this a significant scandal? Will the story have any legs? Allow me to introduce the Electric Minor Political Scandal Acid Test (EMPSCAT). I've been thinking of rolling this out since at least dinnertime tonight.

EMPSCAT consists of a battery of five questions. The more of the questions that can be answered in the affirmative, the bigger the impact of the story. The five questions -- chock-full of Halperin style and/but/nots -- are as follows:

1. Can the scandal be reduced to a one-sentence soundbyte (but not easily refuted/denied with a one-sentence soundbyte)?

This question is important. Something like "Boratgate" -- the Clinton Library / Kazakhstan uranium mining quid-pro-quo-pro-quo that the New York Times reported on in January -- had all the intriguing hooks of a spy novel, but also a plot as convoluted as Mission Impossible II.

2. Does the scandal cut against a core element of the candidate's brand?

3. Does the scandal reify/reinforce/"prove" a core negative perception about the candidate, particularly one that had henceforth been difficult to articulate (but not one that has become so entrenched that little further damage can be done)?

Let's take these two together. The classic political scandal is one that makes the candidate look like a hypocrite -- a "family values" champion like David Vitter being caught with a hooker, or Larry Craig with his pants around his ankles.

But perhaps the more damaging kind is one that provides evidence toward a lingering perception about a candidate that had otherwise been hard to articulate. John Edwards' $400 haircut, for instance: doesn't seem like it should have been a big deal, but there was a perception out there that Edwards was a little superficial, and the haircut provided the "proof".

The "best" scandals combine both of these elements. Jeremiah Wright both undermined Obama's unity message and gave voice to the notion that he hadn't been fully vetted. Tuzla both cut against Hillary Clinton's experience meme and played into the perception of her having a rocky relationship with the truth.


4. Can the scandal readily be employed by the opposition, without their looking hypocritical/petty/politically incorrect, risking retribution, or giving life to a damaging narrative?

This is trickier territory than it looks. The Obama campaign couldn't say much about Clinton's comments on RFK without their looking even more tawdry than she did. The Clinton campaign couldn't say very much about Jeremiah Wright without refreshing accusations of race-baiting. And the Law of Unintended Consequences often applies. It was partially because the Obama campaign pushed back a little too hard on Geraldine Ferraro that ABC News took "Politically Incorrect Comments Made by Associates" for $200 and investigated deeper into the Wright tapes.

5. Is the media bored, and/or does the story have enough tabloid/shock value to crowd out all other stories?

A slow media cycle never hurts.

*-*

Let's put La Jollagate through the EMPSCAT.

1. Can the scandal easily be reduced to a one-sentence soundbyte (but not easily refuted/denied with a one-sentence soundbyte)?

In this case, the answer is yes: "The McCains didn't pay their taxes".

The McCains' best one-sentence rebuttal is probably: "It was a clerical error". The problem is that (i) this one has been tried before, and (ii) it takes several more sentences to explain: the property was part of a trust, the trust was managed by a bank, and the bank didn't get the bill. Besides, throwing your accountant under the bus isn't an excuse to avoid paying taxes.

2. Does the scandal cut against a core element of the candidate's brand?

Not to a large extent. McCain hasn't made an especially big deal of housing or taxation issues, for instance. It may cut a little bit against the duty part of McCain's honor and duty theme. There is also a potentially damaging subheadline -- "What? The McCains have seven houses?" -- but he hasn't really tried to run as some sort of champion of the working class.

3. Does the scandal reify/reinforce/"prove" a core negative perception about the candidate, particularly one that had henceforth been difficult to articulate (but not one that has become so entrenched that little further damage can be done)?

Again, probably not -- it seems like something of a one-off. You could try play it as McCain being old and therefore absent-minded, but that would violate Rule #4:

4. Can the scandal readily be employed by the opposition, without their looking hypocritical/petty/politically incorrect, risking retribution, or giving life to a damaging narrative?

Generally speaking, yes. It's a big enough deal that the Obama campaign won't look petty by raising it, nor so personal that they'd look insensitive. Nor is it an area where, as far as we know, Obama has had any problems (if he's been delinquent on his taxes at any point -- no sale).

What the McCain campaign will do is to try and portray it as a Cindy McCain issue rather than a John McCain issue, and remind the media that Obama said hands off the first ladies. But the Obama campaign could call that bluff and have a get-out-of-jail free card against the next Michelle Obama story. McCain also might try and bring up Tony Rezko, but that story has already failed the EMPSCAT several times.

5. Is the media bored, and/or does the story have enough tabloid/shock value to crowd out all other stories?

Yes. It isn't a sexy story, but there's little else going at the moment.

The La Jolla story passes three out of the five questions on the EMPSCAT. Medium-impact, but not spicy.

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Right Track

But here's the other side of the finding that asking national mood questions can skew survey results in Obama's favor. If the mere suggestion that the country might be on the wrong track is enough to send scores of independents into the Obama column, imagine what a concerted effort to frame the discourse that way might do. This is something that Hillary Clinton had started to tap into toward the end of the primary process. Screw hope -- things are bad right now -- and we need solutions.

Obama's "change" message, by contrast, has oftentimes been a little bit too abstract. Here's the messaging that Mssrs. Axelrod and Plouffe need to work on: Iraq's fucked up, the economy's fucked up, health care's fucked up, the environment's fucked up, and all John McCain can say is to "stay the course". If that's the mindset that voters take into the ballot booth with them in November, Obama will win quite convincingly.

It isn't simply a matter of trying to frame McCain as the next Bush. That allows voters to let McCain off the hook if they conclude that McCain isn't the next Bush, and McCain's favorables are strong enough that many voters won't bite on that one. Rather, it's a matter of trying to portray McCain as being out of touch because he doesn't recognize that these things like health care are problems when 70 or 80 percent of the country does.

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Ebb and Flow

Remember what I said the other day about how the McCain campaign should have embraced the results in the Newsweek and LA Times polls so that everything else would look good by comparison?

McCain never really did that, but some on the right side of the blogosphere have gotten the memo. This is Ed Morrissey, whom I usually find pretty fair-minded and reasonable:

Those Newsweek and LA Times polls look more and more like outliers or worse. With both Gallup and Rasmussen showing either outright or virtual ties in their presidential tracking polls, Time offers even more evidence that Barack Obama has failed to pull away from John McCain after clinching the nomination.

[...]

The results should raise eyebrows anyway. Obama has actually lost ground since February, which dovetails with his collapse in the final months of the Democratic primary. This tends to underscore the shakiness of the Obama phenomenon; it hasn’t translated into general-election enthusiasm, and the trends are going in the wrong direction. Among the wider and less-predictive sample of registered voters, that has to cause a great deal of concern among Democrats who thought Obama would sail to victory on the puffery of “hope and change”.

Well, I don't know how you define "pull away", but Obama's lead is roughly 5 points larger than it was before the primaries ended. We have dozens and dozens of points of evidence to back that up.

Has there been a bounce since February -- the last time that Time conducted a national poll? You shouldn't really expect one. If you look at our Super Tracker graph, you'll find that February was the other time in this election that Obama was polling extremely well. If you held the election on February 12th, Obama would probably have won about 33 states. Same thing if you held the election today.

Some will say that the voters haven’t paid much attention to the race, and that Obama has plenty of time to put distance between himself and McCain. However, that ignores the attention Obama has received all throughout this campaign, especially in 2008. He has graced magazine covers across a wide spectrum of interests and the significance of his candidac has been widely discussed for months, while McCain has had relatively little time in the spotlight. Obama will receive more scrutiny and less celebration in the coming four months, while McCain’s profile will rise rapidly. Obama needed to have a big lead before then, a head start to ride out the coming storm.

The more people see of Obama, the less they seem to like him.

Well, I'd agree that Obama has been the focal point for media attention ever since he won the Iowa caucus. But it isn't as though the attention has universally been positive. On the contrary, Obama's media narrative was pretty brutal for substantial periods of March, April and May.

His polling did suffer during this time frame, and he'll have other cycles like this too; in fact, I sense one starting fairly soon. But with the exception of the couple of weeks surrounding Jeremiah Wright's debut onto the scene, McCain wasn't really able to overtake him. And including the Jeremiah Wright thing, Obama has been a very resilient and media-savvy politician. It's not clear which point on the Brooks-o-Meter represents the steady state.

That's been the ebb and flow of the race in a nutshell. At his high tide -- when his media narrative is good -- Obama should win a relatively convincing victory, which might be more impressive in the Electoral College than in the popular vote because of the way the states are aligned this year. At Obama's low tide, we'll have another 2000, where we're all staying up late on Election Night -- or maybe even until Alaska's results are counted the next morning.

But McCain has never been in control of this election. Even now, one has the sense that he's playing for a tie.

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Which Candidate has a Base Problem?

That title is not meant to be read rhetorically or sarcastically. But the correct answer is "both of them". The thing, however, is that they are somewhat opposite problems.

The below is data compiled from Rasmussen Reports, consisting of over 7,000 likely voter interviews conducted within the past week. What I'm looking at is solely perceptions of the candidate among voters within his own party.



The topline numbers are not very different from one another. Obama's favorables among Democrats are 82:17, and McCain's among Republicans are 84:15. However, that conceals a lot of information about the strength of those perceptions.

A greater number of Democrats' -- about 8 percent -- have a very unfavorable view of Obama. These 8 percent are your PUMAs -- people that will probably not vote for Obama under any circumstances. Only 4 percent of Republicans feel that way about John McCain.

Obama would be thrilled, of course, if he could actually get his defection rate down to 8 percent: John Kerry lost 11 percent of Democrats to George W. Bush; Al Gore lost 11 percent to Bush and 2 to Nader; Bill Clinton lost 10 percent to Bob Dole and 5 percent to Ross Perot. In reality, Obama will probably lose almost all of the "very unfavorables" and perhaps half of the "somewhat unfavorables", which would produce a defection rate of 12-13 percent (not all of those necessarily to McCain). McCain's defection rate, by that calculus, would be 9-10 percent (not all of those necessarily to Obama).

But look, by contrast, at the enthusiasm gap between the two candidates. 56 percent of Democrats have a very favorable view of Barack Obama, while just 34 percent of Republicans have a very favorable view of John McCain. The thing that's a little bit scary for McCain is that this is after a likely voter screen has been applied, and so even after you get done filtering out those Republicans around the margins who weren't planning to vote in the first place, many of the remaining ones are still doing so for McCain somewhat grudgingly.

The good news for McCain is that if the election is close, the vast majority of these people should still wind up voting for him. That's what turnout operations are all about, and the GOP generally runs a pretty good one. Besides, 52 percent of Republicans have a very unfavorable view of Obama, as compared to 33 percent of Democrats who feel that way about McCain.

But if the election doesn't look like it's going to be close, there could be a snowball effect in which Republican turnout is quite low. If that is the case, the map could turn out to be very, very blue, and Republicans might lose a couple more Senate seats than are generally thought to be in play -- somewhere like Idaho, for instance, could be interesting -- and perhaps an extra dozen or half-dozen House seats on top of that.

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Should McCain just embrace the bad polls?

I don't have a big problem with the details of the McCain campaign's pushback on yesterday's LA Times / Bloomberg poll, which had shown Barack Obama ahead by 12 points. In contrast to some of the memos that the press was treated to from the desk of Mark Penn, the McCain team's argument is relatively even-tempered and even-handed, fully acknowledging that their candidate does have a deficit to make up in the polls, if not the double digit margin implied by the LAT.

At the end of the day, what this really boils down to is an academic argument about whether one should weight polls by party identification, which is perhaps the most controversial subject in polling and one without any wrong answers. My take, for what it's worth, is that weighting by party ID may increase the precision of any one individual poll, but reduce the accuracy, particularly if you are able to look at several different polls at once.



My question, however, is just who is the audience is for this critique? It's June, and the election is in November. While the overall volume of polling data does give us some hints about what is more or less likely to occur in November, who the hell cares if McCain is down in any one particular poll? If he's down by 3, it's because he's down by 3, and if he's down by 11, it's because he's down by 11. The polling is simply a manifestation of that reality and not its cause.

Moreover, it is not clear to me that this is a spin war worth winning. If the media believes that Barack Obama is ahead by 5 points, then if a new poll comes out next week showing him ahead by 3, it will not get any attention. But if the media believes that Obama is ahead by 12 points, that same poll would create the perception of McCain momentum, and perhaps trigger a couple of days' worth of bad press for Obama as whatever had been going on over the past couple of days of the campaign would be taken as the cause for his polling decline. It might lead to harsher treatment of Obama's decision (flip-flop?) on campaign finance, for instance, or if Iran had been the subject of the week, as evidence that Obama wasn't resonating with voters on foreign policy.

McCain's campaign is absolutely right that the media ought not to focus too much on any one particular poll. But there are times later on when it's going to want them to do just that.

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Is Charlie Black Right?

The television in my office is broken, which means that I can't gauge the pundit insta-reaction to Charlie Black's comments to Fortune magazine about a terrorist attack being a "big advantage" for John McCain. Frankly, I am probably a better analyst without te