Oct 05 2008
The Failing McCain-Palin Campaign Still Drawing Record Crowds
Update: Well Obama tried, but Palin actually got a crowd of 30,000 in Carson CA, which is 50% more than Obama got in Asheville, NC.
Update: It seems Obama was able to pull about 20,000 today at a rally in NC. Impressive – he is as good as Palin, which makes me wonder all the more about the polls and the supposed huge lead Obama-Biden supposedly have. – end update
As I noted in a previous post, there is something seriously wrong with polls showing an Obama wave across the country, yet on the ground Palin still commands record crowds (without enlisting big name music groups like Obama does to pad his events). For a campaign on the ropes and supposedly losing in VA and FL, how is it Palin is out in CA and drawing crowds the state has NEVER seen before for a political rally:
Coming off a well-received debate performance with Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden, Palin is again proving to be a big draw on the campaign trail.
Yesterday’s rally in the tennis stadium of the Home Depot Center was attended by 20,000 people, with several thousand more in an overflow area in the parking lot, arena officials said.
Check out this AP picture of the event and tell me this is a campaign in a tail spin:
20,000 people in dark blue CA? And this was just Palin. Does anyone believe the nation has written off this woman? I am looking forward to seeing how many Obama draws in Asheville NC today. An initial glimpse of the ‘crowd’ gathering I see on TV today tells me he would be lucky to get 5-6,000.
Addendum: If Obama’s crowds are a facade built upon real draws like Springsteen (updated link above)then a lot of his support could also be as ethereal – which means the polls could be measuring something more akin to a hint than tangible reality. Another factor in recent polls may have been voters sending a polling message to the GOP: ‘vote for the bailout or we go with Obama‘. Now that the bailout has passed it could be that the electorate has gotten their message to the GOP and they are going to go back to backing their Mavericks. I still cannot fathom Obama’s being overwhelmingly in the lead yet Palin gathering the crowds and TV audience she does.Â
I tell you what, if the next Obama-McCain debate falls short of the Palin-Biden debate numbers we should just throw all these polls in the trash.
I watched a documentary on the economic crisis and found out that Obama structured the strategy by ACORN ro pressure banks to reduce the credit requirements for mortgages and many of these poorly documented loans led to many of the foreclosures today. He not only structured the strategy but trained the ACORN operatives. BTW, he is funding many of their operations in “get out the fraudulent votes” ACORN is to OBama what the brown shirts were to Adolph.
More….Schumer and Frank covered Fannie and Fredie’s back in the Congress as the bubble was growing blocking regulations that were needed to prevent economic collapse. While Raines and Johnson, two Obama supporters, were on the inside at Fannie making it happen. This whole “October” surprise so to speak has the stench of Dem politics all around it. Why McCain is not hitting hard on this is beyond me. If McCain has not got the stomach for it, then I suggest he give it to Palin – she has no fear when it comes to going after the enemy.
I would forget Ayers and go after them on this – this is where he is vulnerable because there is a trail of evidence that they can use.
Jacqui has it right. I love this woman but she can not save him.
McCain has to address the issue that took him down. I suggest he get the facts and NAMES, book TV for a MAJOR speech and let loose. If he does not have the NAMES of who tried to put ACORN into that first vote, he needs to get them or ASK for the NAMES on TV.
The Dems and their soldiers made him look like a fool over this. It took him down because everyone in America knows Pugs are for deregulation. He has to 1)actually understand the difference and 2)make it so simple that we can understand it 3)names of the people who protect this. This needs to be TOMORROW.
They are voting. They are stealing and buying the vote, TODAY. Reminds me of being in the postion of appointed watcher. They provided transportation and if some were not interested, they paid them. Money for an hour of your time. No, the names were not on the registered list. No problem, the Dems just signed them in and put their ballot into the box. Guess who won? Same thing TODAY. They are buying the vote with entertainment and fraud. The Dems always use the same practices. Yesterday it was the black vote being treated as children. Today it is the children being treated as children.
Sarah is wonderful but McCain is a day late. He needed to name those names……….yesterday. Only McCain can save McCain at this point. He never understood the MSM.
Downtown Clearwater prepares for Palin appearance
With Tampa Bay shaping up to be a major political battleground, Palin will speak at a rally Monday morning that’s expected to draw a good crowd at Coachman Park, which holds about 12,000 people. That means rallygoers and others around downtown Clearwater will be dealing with traffic, parking, closed streets and tight security.
The city is preparing for the event — and bracing for it.
“We are here to support the rally and the people’s opportunity to get close to a candidate, and also to minimize their frustrations on event day,” said city spokeswoman Joelle Castelli. “Those are our goals.”
The gates at Coachman Park open at 6 a.m., with Palin scheduled to speak about 9 a.m.
Parking will be available at the Jack Russell Stadium lot, just off Seminole Street, about a mile northwest of the park, but it is expected to fill up quickly. Shuttle buses will run between the stadium and the rally from 6 a.m. to noon.
SBD
These poll results are nothing but a setup so when Obama loses, the Loony Left will claim that McCain/Palin and the Republicans stole the election again like they claimed in 2000.
SBD
Voters by 20-1 were against this bailout! Confiscation of their money to bailout an inept, irresponsible congress and their crooked buddies in Fannie and Freddie and ACORN.
In order to stop the bleeding McCain must present the issue as a congressional oversight problem that he and fellow Repubs going clear back to Clinton tried to correct, but were blocked at every try by the corrupt Dems. He has a good ad using Clintons words to do this, but alas it seems Clinton wants McCain to win more than McCain does.
He has to defend his complicity in this money grab by saying at least he got the Repubs to a table they were previously locked out of and as result made a terrible bill a little better.
George Bush is partly responsible for this disaster in that he appointed a Dem and Wall Street insider who has sabatoged McCain with the Dem leadership and George was as usual a terrible salesman to the American people as to how and why this happened and why a bailout was needed.
Right now Mccain is in trouble because the Repubs have been painted as responsible along with capitalism and the free market. None of this is true, and it is incumbant upon the man who would be the president to name the names he said he would, make famous those responsible as he said he would, screw the wishy washy bipartisanship and speak the truth as the straight talk express says it does.
All that assuming he knows and understands the problem as it really is and is not merely another Democrat mouthpiece in drag. This is not a time to pander it is a time to lay they blame where the responsibility lies. Start by asking for Barney Franks resignation.
SBD, the skewed polls can supress voter turnout, why bother going to the polls if it is you candidate is not going to win anyway?
Yep, you said it better dhunter except for the Bushbash.
I love what Palin is saying. Keep it up. Hit with the good Rev and Farrakhan. The MSM is already attacking her. They are calling her racist for bringing up a terrorist. Yep.
The same way she was able to get in the “drill, baby, drill”, she should take another shot at the MSM. Someone creative should come up with with a “count, baby, count”. I use to say this all the time. Can you count? When they say the news is not bias, count. Count the favorable vs unfavorable above the fold and what you see on TV. Not rocket science. You have to make them the joke, backed up with nothing but your fingers.
Wish she would say something like ‘they think we are so stupid we can’t count’.
I am a big Bush supporter but the fact of the matter is he is a terrible salesperson never taking his message to the people and never defending himself or his party and it is showing up in the race this year as it did in 2006. Constant bashing of Repubs by the Dem party and their allies in the press without so much a s a reply by the party leader leaves the impression on the impressionable that there must be something to the mostly false accusations.
He never ever explained why it was necesary for taxpayers to cough up a trillion of their hard earned dollars. Except to say the credit market was tightening.
Not nearly enough for a money grab and redistribution of wealth of this magnitude. I t opened the door for further Repub bashing and it now is incumbant upon McCain to explain this mess and prove:
1.) He is a Republican that believes in the free market, capitalistic system and
2.) He actually wants to make a diffence in this great country and be the next POTUS
pjo, the opposite is also true, especially when you have been convinced that your candidate is going to be ahead by so much, why do you need to go out and vote. If Dems are anything, they are lazy, so pretending to have such a lead could backfire big time.
SBD
Apparently, Palin is drawing more than just record crowds, check out the prices for the Oct. 10 fundraiser in Pittsburgh.
Palin coming to Pittsburgh for fundraiser
Ticket prices are $1,000 to attend the event, $10,000 for a picture with Palin, and $25,000 for a roundtable meeting with the Alaska governor, Roddey said.
SBD
I think a few things are happening:
#1, a lot of people who have no intention of voting for Obama are telling pollsters that they are. It is sort of the average person’s way of being able to “get back” at the media elites who think they know everything.
#2, with women and independents bailing on Obama, the media is desperate to stop the bleeding and is making it appear that there is nothing to see .. move along … Obama’s winning by a comfortable margin …
#3 They have begun to increase the skew in their polling samples in order to get the desired result.
What I find most amazing is that it appears that the Republicans are getting the blame for the Democrat engineered collapse of the government mortgage guarantee corporations. It was Democrats running those operations when the fraud was discovered. The former CEO’s of those groups are now “senior advisors” of the Obama campaign and it was the Republicans who had been warning about this for years with the Democrats saying there was no problem.
We need more national media outlets like Fox and we need a Republican party that is able to get the message out.
Oh, and once the Treasury put the kabosh on the “mark to market” requirement last week, we really didn’t need a “bailout”. The bailout was only required in order to rid the banking sector of under performing mortgages that would have brought down the value of their entire portfolio had the “mark to market” requirement remained. Without that requirement, there was no need to dump those mortgages. So … the administration actually “fixed” the problem by removing the requirement and then the Democrats passed a huge pork bill.
Orwell would be proud of us today.
This may be a foolish hope on my part, but — somebody else on another website somewhere claimed that somebody asked McCain this week when he was going to go on the attack, and McCain answered, “How about next Tuesday?” So I’m hoping that McCain’s strategy has been to let the Mediacrats expend their ammo in September and then McCain would start blasting away about Obama’s terrorist connections and the Democrats’ hamstringing of the banking and mortgage industries in October.
So despite half the people on the Right seeming to try to get used to the idea of an Obama win, I want to wait until next week before climbing aboard the Republican defeat bandwagon. :-/
Definitely worth taking some of these polls with a grain of salt when:
– McCain-Palin is getting record fundraising ($66 Million for the RNC in September)
– Palin is getting record crowds even in “blue” states
I don’t know what is going on, but I’ll mention one thing. I drove from Winchester, VA, to Southern Maryland this afternoon. Through the DC area.
I saw one Obama bumper sticker, one McCain. I wonder just how much interest there really is in this election…and how that will play out on Election Day.
And no, I don’t trust the polls one iota. You’ve got the Bradley Effect in play…Obama will poll higher than his actual performance. The question is, how much?
God – I hope all you commenters are right.
As a community organizer B Hussien Obama worked for nd advocated reparations for slavery. Does he still advocate it and if so why aren’t the Republicans yelling their heads off about it?
During the primary, B Hussien Obama said he would spend a trillion dollars to alleviate poverty in Africa. Didn’t anyone else hear him say it? He plans to dump is another trillion down the same rat hole we have already dumped over a trillion. Everyone knows tht most of the money spent on boondoggles in Africa end up in Swiss Bank accts of ruthless dictators, madmen like Mugabe and/or is diverted to support terrorists and other anti western causes.
These two issue alone would stop Obama’s campaign in it’s tracks.
I live in California. I took my daughter to a birthday party yesterday. Big McCain/Palin yard sign in the front yard, not other signs to be seen on the street. Went to the mall today. Saw a couple of bright red McCain/Palin t-shirts. Didn’t see any Obama shirts.
MIKE M
I don’t know what is going on, but I’ll mention one thing. I drove from Winchester, VA, to Southern Maryland this afternoon.
i know what you mean. I live in a small southern town, about 10,000, and so far this campaign season, I’ve seen exactly one Obama tee shirt, not a single Obama sign, and only about 3 McCain signs, so i wonder the same thing. Where is the interest? but i believe a small turnout favors the Repubs.
The problem with polls is it’s impossible to poll people who don’t answer polls, which is funny, and it’s not.
Despite what pollsters and marketeers insist, it’s a critical slice of the pie. Without it, you can only post data from the primal ass-umption that the spectrum you have polled actually reflects the “general” consensus, which can only ever be coincidentally true.
It’s entirely possible to poll 100 people randomly and still get 100 Obamabots answering. And as someone else pointed here, it also assumes everyone who answers is answering truthfully.
In the current, “two legs bad, four legs good” political climate where even office coolers have become territorially “staked” by the liberal left, don’t bet on the right of center and many of the independents showing their cards until the main event.
The hardship for McCain and the Republicans is to maintain morale and keep fighting in the face of these quiet poll numbers.
Then again, given the media bias, maybe that’s the whole point.