It is very likely that Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. It was always a possibility, and at certain points during this 18-month extravaganza, the odds were better than 50-50 that Obama would pull it out.
But only now has one candidate been inarguably ahead of his rival by a large margin. As pollsters will tell you, voter opinion solidifies in the final weeks of a campaign, and it is very difficult to engineer large swings of public opinion once people have seen the candidates side-by-side and made a decision. Barring a last-minute gaffe, a sudden game-changing event (like the Russian invasion of Georgia or the Wall Street meltdown) or some other October Surprise, the Obama campaign will cruise to victory on Nov. 4.
Accompanying it will be anywhere from five to 10 additional Democratic Senators, and 10 to 20 additional Democrats in the House. It will be the most complete one-party takeover of Washington in a long time.
The day that marked the turning point of the campaign was Sept. 15. Until that day, the Obama and McCain camps had been pretty evenly matched -- maybe with a slight edge to Obama as McCain's convention bounce wore off and Sarah Palin's disastrous interviews became publicized.
But on Sept. 15, the toppling of major financial institutions like Lehman Brothers and AIG ensured that the next few weeks, if not the remainder of the election, would be economy, economy, economy. On the same day, McCain boldly stated, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." That line, which betrayed a disconnect between the public's view of their retirement portfolios and the McCain camp's economic message, will probably go down in history as the death knell for the McCain campaign. It will join John Kerry's "I voted for it before I voted against it," George H.W. Bush's broken "Read my lips: no new taxes" pledge and Walter Mondale's promise to raise taxes as a dying campaign's fatal flaw.
The national tracking polls, which provide a rolling, daily snapshot of public opinion, began breaking sharply for Obama in the aftermath of Sept. 15. A graph of the Gallup tracker, which had looked like a horizontal strand of DNA, the Obama and McCain lines intertwining and looping in a battle for supremacy, suddenly showed the dark green Obama line breaking up and away from the plummeting McCain track.
The Rasmussen tracker, which had never shown the two candidates' numbers more than three points apart (except during conventions), has suddenly broke open into a six-, seven-, eight-point lead for the Democrat. State polls began to reflect the shift, as swing states which had been evenly matched battlegrounds in 2004 began to swing sharply for Obama and states that President Bush carried easily began to look bluer by the day. Republican campaigns that are forced to spend money to keep North Carolina in their column are not winning.
There is still a long-shot chance for McCain to pull this out, but I'm having a hard time seeing how that's possible. The polls will tighten a bit as Election Day approaches (they always narrow somewhat as we get closer to November), but the strength of Obama's economic message will keep the majority of late deciders in his column. How palpable is voters' fears over the economy? Ben Smith of Politico reports: "An Obama supporter, who canvassed for the candidate in the working-class, white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, sends over an account that, in various forms, I've heard a lot in recent weeks. 'What's crazy is this,' he writes. 'I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f--king undecided. They would call him a n----r and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy.'"
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Michael Sherry is a senior majoring in political science. He can be reached at Michael.Sherry@tufts.edu.
