Losing Ground?

Yesterday's WaPo did a long piece about how the Obama campaign is registering new voters and how that is key to their campaign in Virginia.

Virginia has added nearly a quarter-million registered voters since the 2004 elections, and about half of that growth came from increasingly Democratic Northern Virginia.

With Virginia a battleground state in the presidential race for the first time in 44 years, the additional voters have the potential to alter long-standing electoral patterns in some historically Republican counties while reinforcing the Democratic tilt of others.

According to a review of registration statistics from Nov. 1, 2004, through Aug. 1 of this year, Virginia has 235,976 more registered voters than it did in 2004, when President Bush carried the state by 262,000 votes.

Democrats say the newly registered voters are fueling the Democratic resurgence in the state, including the election of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine in 2005 and U.S. Sen. James Webb in 2006.

While I am not one to complain about new voters, I think getting these new voters are a fantastic thing. However, new voters are not always the most reliable voters as many campaigns have found out. The reliable voters are the ones who have worked their behinds off for the party, year in and year out. These voters come from all walks of life and from cities and rural areas and some of those reliable voters are not happy with the way the Democrat's nominee is handling the campaign.

The sea of shining, hope-filled faces that routinely flood Barack Obama's rallies would be an alien environment for the grizzled features and tobacco-stained temperament of Dave “Mudcat” Saunders.

His preferred habitat is up a tree gunning down deer or on the mud flats — which lent him their name — catching catfish, part of an endless struggle with Appalachian wildlife.

Along with his Confederate flag bedspread, the stag heads on his walls, his preference for profanity over punctuation, he would horrify what he calls the “northeastern elitist, Metropolitan Opera wing of the Democrats”.

But, as one of the party's few (some say only) rural strategists, this might just be part of Mr Obama's problem.

“The Democrats talk of tolerance, but in reality the only tolerance they ever exhibit is for their own intellectual arrogance — and they don't have tolerance for my culture,” says Mudcat. “They think we're a bunch of hillbilly heathens who go out and burn crosses and do crazy bullshit.

Emphasis mine. Notice how we (again) had to go to London to find this story? While I certainly don't agree with all of Mudcat's analysis, he offers a lot of wisdom that anyone would be foolish to ignore.

Although Mr Obama won Virginia and has since identified it as a prime target in November's general election, Mudcat cautions that Democrats cannot rely on urban liberals and African Americans in the north of the state.

He describes his hometown of Roanoke as “a trading post, like Tombstone”, belonging to a different culture west of the Blue Ridge mountains of which Mr Obama has no more understanding than Al Gore and John Kerry before him — who lost the rural vote by 16 and 19 per cent respectively.

Senator Obama lost blue collar voters (in the primary) to Hillary Clinton in every state. Mudcat has a record of being on the winning side of Democratic campaigns in Virginia so he knows his state and has a real feel for what is going on there. His thoughts...

He is scathing about the reliance on registering new voters. “If that's how he runs his campaign, he is going to lose. I'd rather bet on those who voted before. When he stands up and says that I'm gonna get 30 per cent more black voters — I'm gonna get 30 per cent more of my people to turn out for me — what is Joe Six-Pack thinking?”

Mudcat suggests that John McCain could win Michigan while holding Ohio and Florida. And, unless Mr Obama changes course, “he ain't gonna win Virgina either”.

Maybe Mudcat is right. If the LATimes/Bloomberg poll is any indication, the bad news is starting to hit Team Obama.

When last we had a L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll to peruse, the result that stood out (aside from Barack Obama's 12-percentage point lead over John McCain in a head-to-head match-up) was what we termed the "passion gap" -- a marked difference in enthusiasm levels that favored the Democrat in the June survey.

The new, just-released poll not only shows the race between the two dramatically tightening -- into a virtual dead heat, with Obama leading in the head-to-head by only 2 percentage points -- but it also identifies a distinct McCain asset: a huge advantage on the question of experience.

Now this is a poll of registered voters (versus likely voters) but the registered voter polls tend to favor Democrats. Also, the LAT/Bloomberg polls traditionally over sample Democrats in their polls. Knowing this, it makes the results all the more telling.

The Obama campaign should be up by 10 points or more. All the indicators say this and yet poll after poll after poll after poll has the race within the margin of error. The campaign is Obama's to lose and it sure looks like he is trying his hardest to do so. If he does not come out of his convention with more than a 6 point bump, it's pretty much all over but the crying.

UPDATE: The RCP state poll update is out and it has even more bad news for Obama. The updated Electoral map shows John McCain with 274 electoral votes and Barack Obama with 264.