Economic Unrest Shifts Electoral Battlegrounds

[Pete]

New York Times October 5, 2008
Economic Unrest Shifts Electoral Battlegrounds
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY

The turmoil on Wall Street and the weakening economy are changing the
contours of the presidential campaign map, giving new force to Senator
Barack Obama’s ambitious strategy to make incursions into Republican
territory, while leading Senator John McCain to scale back his efforts
to capture Democratic states.

Mr. Obama has what both sides describe as serious efforts under way in
at least nine states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including
some that neither side thought would be on the table this close to
Election Day. In a visible sign of the breadth of Mr. Obama’s
aspirations, he is using North Carolina — a state that Mr. Bush won by
13 percentage points in 2004, and where Mr. Obama is now spending
heavily on advertisements — as his base to prepare this weekend for
the debate on Tuesday.

By contrast, Mr. McCain is vigorously competing in just four states
where Democrats won in 2004: Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, followed
by Wisconsin and Minnesota. His decision last week to pull out of
Michigan reflected in part the challenge that the declining economy
has created for Republicans, given that they have held the White House
for the last eight years.

But Mr. McCain’s abrupt decision, which caught many members of his own
party by surprise, also underlined the tactical political squeeze he
finds himself in: by using his fund-raising advantage to compete in so
many places, Mr. Obama has forced Mr. McCain to spend money to hold on
in what had been viewed as safe Republican states, like Indiana and
Missouri, while limiting Mr. McCain’s ability to play offense on
Democratic turf.

Mr. Obama now has a solid lead in states that account for 189
electoral votes, and he is well positioned in states representing 71
more electoral votes, for a total of 260, according to a tally by The
New York Times, based on polls and interviews with officials from both
campaigns and outside analysts. It takes 270 electoral votes to win
the presidency.

Mr. McCain has solid leads in states with 160 electoral votes and is
well positioned in states with another 40 electoral votes, according
to the Times tally, for a total of 200. Just six states representing
78 electoral votes — Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio
and Virginia — are tossups.

Mr. Obama appears to have significantly more options to reach the 270
threshold, particularly if Mr. McCain fails to win any states that
Democrats won in 2004, like Pennsylvania, where the Republican ticket
has been competing especially vigorously.

That said, the margin in many of these states remains relatively
tight, and the field could certainly shift again in the final weeks,
as the presidential candidates engage in two more debates and as Mr.
McCain steps up his attacks on Mr. Obama, as his aides said he planned
to do.

Mr. McCain’s advisers said their hope was that the issue of the
economy would recede somewhat from the public consciousness, now that
Congress has passed a bailout plan, and open the way to try to turn
the contest back into a referendum on Mr. Obama’s credentials. They
argued that given everything that had happened, Mr. McCain remained in
easy distance of Mr. Obama, evidence of what they said were underlying
problems with his appeal.

“Senator Obama has more money than God, the most favorable political
climate imaginable — a three-week Wall Street meltdown and financial
crisis — and with all that, the most margin he can get is four
points?” said Bill McInturff, one of Mr. McCain’s pollsters. “That
does speak to the questions there are about lack of experience, his
candidacy, and other things that make people say, ‘Gosh, is he really
ready?’ ”

Mr. Obama in particular is moving to seize on what both sides think
could be a decisive moment in this campaign, using Wall Street as a
way to focus attention on related concerns, like Social Security and
health care.

Campaigning on Saturday, Mr. Obama told several thousand supporters in
Newport News, Va., that Mr. McCain’s health care plan was outdated and
had hidden tax increases that would erode companies’ coverage for
workers and leave millions of people uninsured.

He called it an “old Washington bait and switch,” adding, “He gives
you a tax credit with one hand but raises your taxes with the other.”

Mr. Obama is now running advertisements aimed at elderly voters in
South Florida, Las Vegas and Reno, Nev., invoking the Wall Street
crisis in criticizing Mr. McCain’s support for allowing individuals to
choose to invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds as an
alternative to Social Security. The advertisements assert that the
approach will “gamble with your life savings.” (That claim has been
described by independent monitoring organizations as deceptive.)

In Florida, voters will begin receiving mailings from Mr. Obama on
Monday warning about what they describe as a McCain plan to tax health
care benefits “for the first time ever.” A new advertisement released
on Friday, using clips from the vice-presidential debate on Thursday
night, makes the same attack on Mr. McCain. In Nevada, advertisements
are geared toward the mortgage crisis in a state that has one of the
highest foreclosure rates in the country.

In Virginia, voters stung by fuel costs received a brochure saying,
“While you’re running on empty, Exxon made $4 billion in one month,”
pointing out that Mr. McCain promised tax breaks to oil companies.
(The tax cuts are not specifically for oil companies but are part of a
broader proposal to reduce corporate tax rates, including those for
alternative energy companies.)

It is health care, advisers said, that they believe resonates more
than other issues for Americans who are worried about their economic
condition. It is a less-threatening way to talk about the economy —
showing pictures of shuttered banks, for example, could create more
worry — that aides said tested well across demographic groups, but
particularly among older voters who have been slower to warm to Mr.
Obama.

“One of the biggest economic anxieties that people have is the cost of
health care,” said Gov. James E. Doyle of Wisconsin, a Democrat in a
state where Mr. McCain is making a strong challenge to Mr. Obama.
“There is a great deal of uneasiness.”

Mr. McCain’s advisers said that more than anything, it was the bad
economy in Michigan, staggered by declining sales of American-made
automobiles, that convinced them they had no hope of winning a state
that once had been high on their list of targets. Beyond that, they
said the Wall Street downturn was hurting Mr. McCain in Florida —
where the mortgage crisis has been particularly acute — a state where
they were once confident that they could hold off Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama opted out of the federal campaign finance system, which
limits spending to $84.1 million, in the belief that he would be able
to raise far more than that and outspend Mr. McCain.

Mr. Obama has used his cash advantage both to expand the size of the
campaign field — it seems a good bet that Mr. Obama would not be
spending money in Missouri if he had an $84.1 million limit — but also
to outspend Mr. McCain in battleground states. In Florida over the
past two weeks, Mr. Obama has spent $5.3 million on television,
compared with just under $1.1 million by Mr. McCain, said Evan Tracey,
the head of CMAG, a company that monitors political advertising.

Mr. Tracey said Mr. Obama had been steadily increasing his national
television advertising budget by 20 percent each week this fall.

Mr. Obama is making a sustained effort to capture from the Republican
column Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North
Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. He is putting effort into Missouri and
Montana, and though those seem like longer shots, Mr. McCain
campaigned in Missouri last week, and Republicans are buying
advertising time there.

“That is a lot of defense that John McCain is going to have to play,”
said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager.

Of the four Democratic states where Mr. McCain is competing, his aides
said he viewed Pennsylvania — the biggest of them — as offering him
the best chance. Mr. Obama lost the Democratic primary there to
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Robert A. Gleason Jr., the state’s Republican chairman, said that
recent polls suggesting that Mr. Obama was building a lead were
misleading, noting that the state was filled with the kind of blue-
collar voters with whom Mr. Obama has struggled for much of the year
to connect. “Obama is not catching on here,” Mr. Gleason said.

Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, did not dispute
Mr. Gleason’s suggestion that Mr. Obama was not as strong in that
state as some polls suggested. “I think they know they have catch-up
to do here,” Mr. Rendell said. “Senator McCain has been here 17 times
since June.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign said that he had been there seven times since the
end of the primary season, June 3.

Mr. Rendell said an unusually long one-minute advertisement Mr. Obama
produced, which showed him talking directly into the camera about the
economic crisis, was one reason polls were showing increasing strength
for Mr. Obama in the state.

The McCain campaign’s announcement that it was pulling out of Michigan
— the kind of news that can be dispiriting to supporters and
contributors — reflects the period the campaign has entered, when it
is difficult if not impossible to do the kind of feints and bluffs
about where the candidate is playing. (For a while, Mr. Obama’s aides
claimed he would be competing in Georgia and even spent some money
there before pulling out over the summer.)

With limited time and money left, it now becomes quickly apparent when
a candidate takes down his television advertisements or cancels a
campaign trip, as Mr. McCain did to Michigan this week. Mr. McCain’s
associates said they put the news out on the day of the vice-
presidential debate in hopes of minimizing attention to it, though
inevitably, it fed the perception that Mr. McCain’s campaign was going
through a difficult stretch.

Yet in a sign of how closely contested the campaign remains, both Mr.
McCain and Mr. Obama have sent people and money into Maine and
Nebraska, two states where electoral votes are split, to try to peel
off a single electoral vote, with Mr. Obama hoping to pick up one in a
particular region of Nebraska, which is otherwise reliably Republican,
while Mr. McCain is trying the same thing in Maine, which has gone
Democratic in recent presidential elections.

That is not a fanciful battle: There are plausible outcomes that would
leave the two men with a 269-269 electoral vote tie, forcing the
election into the House of Representatives.

Mr. McCain sent workers from Michigan to Maine, focusing specifically
on the state’s rural 2nd Congressional District. And Mr. Obama has
added an office filled with organizers in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional
District, which includes Omaha, where a large voter registration drive
has been under way for weeks.

“I think we’ve got a shot at that,” Mr. Obama said in an interview in
the summer about the Nebraska vote. “Wouldn’t that be fun?” ***

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company