May 21 2008
Obama Can’t Win For Losing
Seems the Dems still have their tie going on given how the two candidates clobbered each other in different states yesterday (see here for the results and vote tallies to date).  Clinton’s 35% and 250,000 vote win in KY was a route, a complete repudiation of Obama – again.  It happened in West Virginia, and it happened in other large states in the rust-belt area.  Obama is not closing the sale, and in the middle of the country he is, in fact, losing ground.  In liberal Oregon Obama won by a respectable 17% and some 93,000 votes, but that only indicates how many Californians have retired to Oregon – not Obama’s ability to carry the state.
Here’s the deal, once you get outside of the major liberal cities like Washington, New York City, Los Angeles, etc you run into Main Street USA, where people are more like Kentucky than they are the liberal side of Oregon.  Even Oregon is not as liberal as the liberal side of Oregon.  Obama is not selling outside the far left enclaves of the big cities. Worse, he is in fact starting to be rejected by those outside the far left enclaves. All of these dynamics have been shrouded behind national polls that over sample these large population centers.
The truth of this is in the exit polls in KY where, by the end of the day, a whopping two-thirds of democrat voters said they would rather vote Republican or not at all than vote for Obama:
Two-thirds of Kentucky Democrats said they would rather vote Republican or not at all if Obama were the nominee facing McCain, according to exit polls. The percentage was slightly worse than exit poll data from West Virginia, where Clinton also won big.
Emphasis mine. Â Geez, I thought Bush and McCain were unpopular with their base! Â But there is a big difference between the problem Bush and McCain have and Obama now has. Â Bush and McCain gather their rock hard support from the center-right, those pragmatic enough to knowing even marginal progress is better than losing ground to the liberals. Â McCain can win by gathering a center right coalition, even if the far right sits home in a snit. Â Â
Clearly Obama has a very different problem now. Â He is the darling of the far left only. Â He was supposed to be the centrist democrat, bridging the aisle and all that. Â But to beat Clinton he has had to move left somewhat, and the public eye has exposed his liberal (and very out of the mainstream) roots and beliefs. Obama’s base is the marginal far left AND he is being rejected by those center-left to center-right. Â That is the only way you lose 66% of the democrat voters in a state like KY – you are too much a die-hard San Fran liberal type.
And that is what Obama is – a die-hard San Fran liberal trying to snooker all those bitter, bible thumping, gun toting, rubes into believing he is there for them and their values. Â And moreover he is a neophyte when it comes to a tough, national race against a seasoned opponent. Â I used to think Clinton was the easier candidate to beat because of her name. Â But with rejection numbers like this in the Democrat voting block it seems clear Obama is going to get his clocked clean by McCain. Â I now understand why Obama is not 10-15% points ahead of McCain like all democrats are at this stage in the presidential elections.
The race is not over, anything can happen. Â But the likely result will Obama, now the nominee, will continue to take hits and be deflated – which will send even his far left voters into a funk where they lose their will to vote in a lost cause. Â Obama really can’t win for losing in this one it seems.
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Well CNN stopped updating pretty much with 88% of the vote in last night but from what I am seeing on the numbers the turnout percent of registered voters should be close to the 2004 primary in Oregon and better than the dip in 2006 midterm.
However it is NOT going to be a big higher turnout like many preceding states were.
Now part of that comparison is Obama adding young voters, which were high per the exit polls in Oregon and the fact that Kerry was already the guy for the party in 04 and like McCain it depressed primary voting since the guy had already been picked.
But with what looks to be almost stagnant primary turnout to a so so 04 primary it doesn’t say much for the idea Obama is trying to push of him on a wave.
Also his claiming a majority of the pledged delegates is bogus since it leaves out millions of voters from Fl and Mi.
McCain looks to have pulled more votes than Clinton did and this is with a state that gave Paul over 40k or 1 in 6 votes, which says volumes about Oregon.
Poor, poor Barack Obama.
Perhaps he can console himself with the following new polling data from Reuters:
once again…this blog is so far to the “right” that the center looks left from out there on the fringe. bush’s only centrist stand is on immigration and his base completely abandons him on that. un-ending war, torture, illegal wire-tapping, and ginormous deficits are not centrist.
merlin…the delegates from mi. and fla. have not been “seated”…therefore, until they are, his claim is 100% valid. when the delgates are seated, most likely at 50%, then the math will change. what is dubious is clintons claim of the popular vote, which requires all of florida and michigan and that you discount all of the caucus states. in addition delgates nominate, not the popular…as much as i dislike that it’s the rules all agreed to play by. basically clinton is asking that all the rules be changed for her…which is what they are all about.
AJ,
Should we pay any attention to polls between now and November?
One suspects that the machine has the pollsters as locked in
as the “news” organizations.
“All of these dynamics have been shrouded behind national polls that over sample these large population centers.”
Should we tell soothie and norm about this?
hehehe
Sooth & Norm, what’s it like supporting and hoping for a Marxist? Haven’t you learned that lesson yet? Just what, pray tell, in concrete ideas of course, and not that just that the guy gives you a chubbie whenever he speaks, does this candidate have to offer us?
McCain is also starting to catch up with the money. In fact the RNC has more money than the DNC and the Obama campaign is now spending more than it is taking in.
And the general election has not really begun yet.
I think McCain will pick up a lot of these people and that is what should be worrying the Democrats.
As for polls, it is the electoral college that matters. Instapundit had a link to Slate that showed yet another electoral college count with Obama in trouble.
as for norm and soothie, ignore the poor pitiful creatures.
norm:
Actually Bush had majority support on the drug prescription plan and his judges as well as other programs. The man did not win two terms by being out of touch with the majority. After 9/11 he had really high numbers. The problems came later. Obama has not thus far managed to gain that kind of support inside his own party, much less the country. Ever.
Terrye, Those “problems”, as you call them are his fall in popularity due to his fall from grace amongst conservative issues. The Dems were always going to hate him. That leaves the low rating due to indies, centrist, mods, and conservatives. And since Bush has drifted towards the center ever since his first election, it doesn’t take a genius to see what causes his unpopularity. If “centrism” were the true American trend, Bush’s popularity would be rising.
75:
Bush did not drift toward anything. His attitudes on issues like immigration are the same today as they were when he was elected. It seems to me that the right wing pundits were the ones who did the drifting, right off a cliff.
Bush still has strong support from Republicans.
I mean really, what changed? Bush ran as a compassionate conservative. He did not pretend he was the second coming of Newt Gingrich.
He was talking about No Child Left Behind when he was running against Gore. He was talking about guest worker programs when he was the Governor of Texas.
Bush stayed truer to the right than they did to him. He did not falter when it came to pro life issues, whatever the public opinion polls might have said. He did give into the doves on national security, even when the war in Iraq was killing him in the polls.
Bush could have helped himself in terms of poll numbers many times just be walking away from the right. But he did not. Whatever paranoid crap they might say to the contrary.
Bush is a Republican president and somehow people on the right thought that bitching about him was going to help the rest of the party win support. That is stupid.
It had the opposite effect.
The thing that pisses me off is that Bush can take crap from the right, but they will sing the praises of some guy like Tom DeLay who got himself indicted and helped bring that whole corruption K street stuff into Congress in the first place. Do you think that helped Republicans?
No, if you want to bitch about Bush go to HuffPo or DU or Daily Kos, you will be more at home there.
And if centrism were not the trend, McCain would not have the nomination.
When was the last time the far right won an election? Look at Congress.
The trend in the House for the Democrats is to go center with the Blue Dogs. Whatever craziness Obama and Hillary might be up to, my Congressman Brad Ellsworth makes a point of sounding positively rational. He wants no part of that whole debate.
The Republicans that do best are the moderates, or as 75 would call them the RINOs. But then again I don’t think they are the RINOs. They are Republicans, and they want Republicans to win. They are not the ones who are constantly threatening to sit home and let the Democrats win.
You just said so yourself. Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative.” So if he favored the conservatives to get elected, why wouldn’t he continue to favor them once in office?
And as I’ve said repeatedly, the only reason McCain is our candidate is
A) we didn’t have a strong conservative candidate,
B) he’s the media’s chosen golden boy and
C) the Dems have given us two far left candidates.
None of these point towards any big groundswell of centrist support. In fact, and I’ve stated it before, the Democrats themselves have given us far more reasons to vote against them than McCain has given us to vote for him. And that indifference, is what you should really be worried about…not some conservative boogeyman that doesn’t exist.
And one more thing 75, most Americans do not think of Bush as centrist. Most Americans think of Bush as conservative. That is just the way it is. You might not see it that way, but they do. They have said so time and again in all sorts of polls. They do not think of him as far right however, most Americans do see a difference.
That is why Newt Gingrich could never win a national election. That is why Tancredo can’t either.
When did Bush not favor conservatives? When they accused him selling out the American people to the Mexicans? When they accused him selling the ports to terrorists so that they could kill us all? When they accused him of trying to put a liberal on the supreme court?
There was not a strong conservative canidate, because the country is moving away from conservatism. It will undoubtedly move back. In the UK the politics are moving toward the right, these things do cycle.
The truth is the conservatives do not want to face certain realities. It is easier to pile on Bush and help the Democrats make his life a living hell than it is to face the fact that the Republicans in Congress did not nothing to help themselves. That way they don’t have to change. They can party like it is 1994 forever.
But times change. And one thing I have learned, there are people on the fringes out there who have no loyalty at all to any party.
But hey, why change. Just lose in 06 so that you can win in 08 and lose in 08 so that you can in 10. Once Bush is gone everything will be fine for Republicans. Sure. But then the right will just start doing the same thing to McCain that they did to Bush.
And I do not believe in boogey men conservative or otherwise. I vote a straight Republican ticket 75 and if that is not good enough for you then maybe you are the one with the boogeyman problem.
Hey Hadit:
Hate to bust your bubble, but the there is a far greater likelihood that the algorithms being used by the pollsters don’t include factors for the massive numbers of new voters who will flock to the polls in November to get rid of the Republican nightmare.
Like I said, the futures markets have it at 62-38 Dems v. Republicoidsâ„¢ . . . and its only going to get worse the ‘coids.