Republican math problems

It has taken me a little while to wrap my mind around John McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, but after reading widely and going beyond the superficial CNN/MSNBC-type coverage, it now makes quite a lot of sense to me.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer called it a “Hail Mary” — and what’s instructive about this coming from Schumer is that he’s the chair of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. 

It is a Hail Mary – but an extremely rational one – as Schumer knows. See, Chuck Schumer’s job at the DSCC is, in part, to keep track of the math.

John McCain has a very big math problem.

The fact that he’s even competitive in this fall election is a stunning testimony to the strength of his personal brand (earned or not; I’d argue the latter, but that’s a topic for another post) and this nation’s lingering uncertainty whether it is ready to elect someone other than a white man as Commander-in-Chief.

With Bush’s profound unpopularity, with the economy on the brink of recession, with Americans weary of an ineffective war justified on false grounds, the Republicans have been girding themselves for catastrophic losses — possibly as bad as the post-Watergate elections in November 1974 — with the Democrats picking up at least five or six seats in the Senate (and conceivably, if improbably, enough to reach the filibuster-proof majority of sixty senators) and twenty or more seats in the House of Representatives.

Over the past couple months since Barack Obama clinched the Democratic Party nomination, the popular polls have oscillated, from Obama up (by a maximum of 7-9 points) to a statistically insignificant McCain lead. But the election is not won in the popular vote; it’s won in the Electoral College, and there, McCain is up against daunting math, with almost no margin for error. On a state by state basis, Obama has maintained a solid lead in states with 250-260 Electoral votes, while McCain is lingering behind, around 180-210. As anyone who remembers the 2000 debacle knows, 270 is the magic number. Sure, Obama could stumble – but he’s already out-strategized the most formidable pair of American politicians since Ronald Reagan; McCain may loathe Obama as an undeserving upstart, but he’s not foolish and he’s not counting on Obama to finally implode.

The election will be decided in a dozen or so states; McCain needs almost all of them to win; and the math favors Obama in many of them. This is what it all boils down to. 

McCain had three sets of choices:

1) Veer hard to the center, by picking Tom Ridge or (by all accounts his first choice) Joe Lieberman. But that doesn’t bring in nearly enough center-conservative voters (except, with Ridge, maybe in Pennsylvania) to overcome the mass desertion from the ticket from pro-life social conservatives.

2) Stay the course, by picking Tim Pawlenty (the perfect safe choice: six years as governor, a former majority leader in the state legislature, no national baggage to overcome) or Mitt Romney (a national reputation, a former governor, known for his economic management, though distrusted by the moral conservatives for his previous lack of enthusiasm for anti-abortion or antigay politics). Such a choice would not change the electoral math (Pawlenty couldn’t guarantee Minnesota, and Romney might not help enough in his original homestate of Michigan for it to be worth it). Plus, in Romney’s case, McCain loathed him for a long time, and handing the Democrats the tagline of “McCain-Romney: two men, twelve houses” must have churned McCain’s stomach.

3) Veer hard to the right, and change who is voting. 

It’s too early to say that Howard Dean won the 2008 election for the Democrats back in 2004, but his fifty-state strategy has brilliantly put states in play that the Democrats wrote off for years, especially in the Mountain West. Add on the xenophobic immigration politics of the GOP (not actually McCain’s fault, or even Bush’s), and Colorado and Nevada have turned blue; Arizona may not be far behind, though presumably McCain will easily hold onto his home state for this time around. 

Picking the rifle-toting, creationist, ferociously anti-abortion Palin is part of McCain’s calculations to try to peel away the Western states where Obama is leading or the race is too close to call: Montana, the Dakotas, Alaska itself, and most critically, Colorado. Other than Colorado, those are small states, population-wise – but as the Clinton campaign learned, ignore those states at your own peril.

Ultimately, though, this is about women voters, as many, many observers have noted. But not the mythical pissed-Clinton voters- a phenomenon well on its way to being the most overrated American political phenomenon in decades. For those of you who know a bit about the politics of the Sixties, those voters are the Weathermen of today — not in their radical politics (hardly), but in attracting dramatic attention far, far, far in excess of their actual numbers (and the mainstream media swallowing it all hook, line, and sinker). 

No, it’s the evangelical women voters who McCain is gambling will change the math – and it’s not truly much of a gamble, because the choice is certain loss versus probable loss. 

They might reasonably make a difference in keeping Missouri and Indiana in the GOP column. Perhaps Florida too, although if there’s any deep substance to her previous support for Pat Buchanan, alienating Florida’s Jewish voters could be disastrous for the GOP. 

Are there enough of these hard-right women to change the electoral results in all or all but one of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia? Probably not — but not beyond the pale.

This is McCain’s only possible path to victory. Palin might be a rising star; she could have a gift for management – she hasn’t been around long enough to know. Obama picked Joe Biden both to win and to govern after January 20, after debating him for months and months. McCain, in turn, picked a running mate whom he had met once before last week. He can’t remotely imagine Palin is experienced enough to act as CEO of the executive branch of the federal government — or to hold her own with, say, Vladimir Putin if something happened to McCain. There’s simply no way to argue that, and no way to imagine McCain picking a male running mate with a résumé as short as Palin’s. 

It’s a deft choice in certain ways – Obama can reasonably argue that he has the right kind of experience, and that McCain’s record, however long, does not demonstrate the leadership the U.S. needs right now… but that’s a subtle argument, easily lost in a soundbite media; attacking Palin’s lack of preparedness for this job still puts the debate back in the spotlight, which Obama probably does not want. Biden will have to be careful not to come off as attacking or patronizing to Palin – not fair, but it’s there. Moreover, just when the Democrats had mostly healed the divisions of the primary campaign, McCain sticks a knife in the wound and twists. 

We could focus on Palin’s flip-flopping: she was for the bridge to nowhere, then she was against it. She took on the old boys network in Alaska politics, then was embraced by Ted Stevens. She challenged big oil — and supports drilling in ANWAR and whereever else possible (are there any little oil companies out there? Any mom-and-pop drilling operations and pipelines I haven’t heard of?) She’s championed ethics reforms — and is under an ethics cloud herself. In these ways, she’s a perfect complement for McCain, whose flip-flopping has got a free pass from the mainstream media so far.

In the end, though, Sarah Palin is a distraction – and John McCain calculated that into his math too. It probably won’t work: shoring up his right by ceding the center – now matter how much it might already be slipping away – is a long-shot strategy. But sometimes, Hail Mary passes do get caught. At Invesco Field on Thursday, Obama took the fight to John McCain, and he’d be well-advised to keep his sights trained on why he, not McCain is the safe and smart choice for the U.S., and not get distracted by any bright, shiny objects. Based on what he’s done over the past year and a half, I’d say you can count on it.

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Tags: 2008 u.s. presidential election, barack obama, joe biden, john mccain, sarah palin

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