Okay, I know it’s ARG but when two completely different polling companies show Obama leading in Florida, despite never leading McCain there before it’s noteworthy. The New Hampshire results have to be a heartbreaker for McCain personally. Looks like we finally have our long awaited Obama bounce afterall. Ugh.
American Research Group Florida General Election
- Barack Obama 49%
- John McCain 44%
American Research Group New Hampshire General Election
- Barack Obama 51%
- John McCain 39%
Sample size: 600 likely voters
Sample dates: June 13-17, 2008
June 18th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
I’m inclined to say this thing is over. Obama now leads in every swing state except for Missouri. There’s probably no way he loses enough of them to hand McCain the election.
Hopefully Obama will be garbage, and we can give the White House to the Romster in a landslide in 2012.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Get used to it. This is only the first in a long stream of McCain negative polls. When you run an unlike,able non-conservative, you’re just asking for a whooping. The GOP had this coming to it, courtesy of McCain and Huckabee.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
A lot of this trend is pure Obama nomination bounce from the oversaturated news coverage. He’ll come back down and achieve parity with McCain soon. Plus, I have faith that Obama will come through and pull a few more devastating gaffes out of his hat soon.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Wow. Based on my electoral college predictions it’s 330-208 in Obama’s favor. I’m inclined to agree with Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com (a must read poll site btw):
“If Florida is in play, then John McCain’s defense is completely broken; it was the one traditional swing state that always had looked off-limits to Obama.”
As long as FL looked like a lock, McCain could spread most of his resources in the upper Midwest/Rust Belt region. But if Obama is really ahead or even tied in FL, that changes things tremendously. If McCain has to defend FL, given it’s huge and expensive media markets, he’ll have a lot less to work with in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
#4, exactly. Florida was supposed to be completely out of reach for Obama. Sewing that up would have allowed him to live in the rust belt.
Now he can’t. This thing is over, barring an Obama meltdown.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Anything can happen, as always, but this is a major uphill battle for McCain. And in an uphill battle, a party needsw broad and unified support. In this case, the GOP has begrudgingly fallen in behind their “nominee.” There simply isn’t the will power or heart to pull out an uphill win. McCain was the wrong man for the job, and the impending humiliation in November should be a lesson for the GOP in the future.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Ugh, it’s going to be a wipeout. Bad, very bad. If I was Veep candidate it would kill your career too so I suspect that alot people are going to turn down that job too. Why commit suicide with McCain?
June 18th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
God, you people act like the election is tomorrow. It is in NOVEMBER, over 4 months from now. We all knew Obama would
get a bounce after winning the Dem nomination. We should have expected him to start leading in unusual places. Remember
when McCain was tied in NY and MA? These are the same things, polling aberrations at a time when Obama is riding high.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
It’s just not the case. Polls or no polls, McCain is a losing candidate. The writing was on the wall long before these polls came out.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I dont care what Quinnipac
and ARG say McCain wins FL
just by talking to Democrats
here.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
#9:
Well tough, we are stuck with him whether you all like it or not. It is time for Republicans to stop feeling
sorry for themselves, role up their sleaves and start fighting the Democrats. I don’t agree with McCain on everything
but I’m still going to wave signs and make phone calls for him. This is bigger than just McCain, this is the future
of America we are talking about. I for one am not going to give Barack Obama the Presidency with a Dem controlled
House and Senate just because the polls look bad in the middle of June.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Wow the doom and gloom is getting worse all the time. The way everyone is talking we should not even bother voting, lets just anoint the Obama and get it over with.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
We always knew it would be a tough battle for the GOP nominee and the hope was that McCain would have a better shot than most. That is probably still true. But I don’t think any quite knew how bad a campaign he would run (even though running out of money before IA was a clue). I think the long campaign has taken a toll on him. He sometimes comes across as lethargic. He could use some new young blood in his campaign and I don’t mean VP, I mean campaign manager and strategists.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Need I remind people that the only GOP nominee to lead at this point in the election cycle, in the last 36 years, was George W. Bush in 2000? Ford trailed by 40 points post convention. He lost by 2. Reagan trailed by 9 points in 84′. He won 49 states and lost the 50th by about 3000 votes. Reagan even appears to have trailed in 80′ though the polling is not quite so clear. I’m not particularly worried about these trends; historically the electorate comes back to the Republican candidate as the election draws nearer; they even did so in 76′ (in a very big way), despite a climate as horrific for Republicans as today’s.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Oh, and Bush trailed Dukakis in 88′. Obama is in a nearly historically weak position for a Democrat, especially given the tenor of the political climate.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Wow, an ARG poll. Yawn.
I’m not trying to be Pollyana here, but I don’t think that ARG is a great authority.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
The doom is based on McCain strategy on winning independents. When you are losing independents in a place like Alaska at a 68 to 32 clip then your national strategy is doomed. Ain’t going to win any swing state with those percentages. Then add to the fact that the base will not be energized to Bush levels then that is a recipe for a wipeout.
June 18th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
First, only Rasmussen and Quinnipiac have polled FL regularly and Quinnipiac has always had the race closer than Rasmussen. Second, Quinnipiac’s numbers prior to June were skewed by this stupid category they had called “Not Voting.” This category consistently got 4-5 percent in their polling until it was discontinued in June. McCain lost 2% in FL between May and June. The rest of Obama’s gain seems to be the “Not Voting” cohort. This was probably Hillary voters refusing to state an alternate. So, in Q-Pac’s polling, the race in FL was always much closer than the top line number appeared. Finally, why have you all assumed FL was a lock? It was a tie in 2000 and Bush won by less than 3% in 2004. Let’s see what Rasmussen’s next poll shows. His polling in March and April showed McCain up 10. I would expect it to be near a tie in June.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
McCain up by 1 in new Rasmussen Ohio. Everyone can breathe a sigh of relief…the world isn’t going to end after all (yet anyway).
June 18th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Houston:
You will think by all of the comments today that the election was over. It’s June people. Plenty of time to blooy up Snobama.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
On top of everything already stated, are we all forgetting how abysmal Sen Obama has been at “sealing the deal?” When it was obvious to just about everyone he was going to win the nomination months ago, what happened? Instead of flocking to him and giving him resounding victories to win the nomination, he instead limped and scraped by, essentially tying Sen Clinton from that point on (and lost virtually every battleground state in the process). If this is the best Sen Obama can get his lead to, I think Sen McCain has a real chance to win.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Can everyone please read Matthew’s post, #14.
You guys are all going to lose your minds if you keep up this level of hysteria.
I still think we are going to lose, but I wouldn’t put any money on either side. In those other elections the GOP didn’t even have the attack ad arsenal that we do this time against Obama (Ayers, Bitterclingers, Wright, etc.). Each of those can be used to target demographics that are either swing voters or are a key part of the GOP base that might otherwise stay home.
In the past the Dem nominees have lost support almost purely on the basis of their own liberal positions. After all raising taxes on the “rich” is a winning policy position in the vague sense. However, as soon as people find out that Obama wants to raise taxes on single people making $60K or couples making $120K, it becomes a political loser that has caused Dems to lose every head-to-head election in the past 28 years.
In other words it has been over 30 years since greater than 50% of America voted for a person who said they would raise taxes.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
When LA and Boston made it to the Finals everyone began making the comparisons to the old Laker-Celtics series. And they drag out the series record going back decades. But the truth is Paul Pierce is not Bird, Garnett is not McHale, tand Kobe is not Magic. Obama is not Dukakis and McCain is not Bush41. And the democratic primaries don’t predict the general.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Tela: History is all we really have to go by at this point. I’d say that such an analogy may actually be somewhat helpful when you consider all the negatives Obama has against him (associations, taxes, extreme liberal policies (wait until the prolifers hear about the vote not to give babies that survive abortions medical care because he was worried this would make the fetus a legal person)). The public doesn’t know Obama yet, and, quite frankly, they aren’t going to like him if McCain allows the 527s to do their job.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
are we all forgetting how abysmal Sen Obama has been at “sealing the deal?”
That was a Clinton meme. You seem to be forgetting that Clinton was always the favorite and Obama took down the very powerful Clinton machine.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Geez — it’s June.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
It’s incredibly depressing to think that our troops will have to salute a man who is friends with someone that tried to blow up the Pentagon.
I am utterly disgusted and disheartened.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Houston,
The problem is that everything you state is a negative about Obama rather than some positive McCain attribute. One thing this campaign season has shown is that the electorate is not in the mood for sleaze.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Tela: How is it sleaze to point out the guy is friends with: 1) admitted terrorists (see Ayers), 2) convicted felons (see Rezko), and 3) racial extremists (see Wright, Fahrakan (sp?), and potentially his wife)? How is it sleaze to point to his senate record where he outright states he voted AGAINST giving medical care to fetuses that survive abortion because he was afraid it would give them constitutional rights? How is it sleaze to point out that the post partisan messiah is actually just a new socialist?
It’s called creating contrast…you show the public what he really stands for (which is *extreme* liberalism/socialism) and then you show the your candidate is the moderate one who works with both sides to get things done (and has an actual history of doing so).
I’d be really surprised (and very disappointed) if America voted for an inexperienced racist socialist who wants to raise taxes during a recession over a military hero who promotes energy independence and has served in the senate for over 20 years.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Calling a US Senator a racist socialist isn’t sleazy? Do you think voters are actually going to buy that? Its nonsensical.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Wow – it’s amazing how many people buying into the “it’s over” storyline just don’t seem to comment here that often these days unless there is something negative to write.
It’s bad. But let’s keep things in perspective. In June of 2004 John Kerry was winning in the swing states. That didn’t work out too well.
McCain is down four points nationally among registered voters. How is that going to look in October among likely voters? I don’t know either but based on the past – it’s not over yet, and not by a longshot.
Obama has yet to reach 50 points. He never got a bounce from securing the nomination. Were we or were we not worried that Obama would be leading by double digits by now? All the state polling shows is that when the national numbers swing to the left by a few points, some of the swing states follow. This is rocket science?
Let McCain run his campaign and let the chips fall where they may. And for all of you hard rightwingers I guarantee you that if we ran someone that started the general election off with generic Republican numbers like a certain Three Legged Tool we’d be in a much digger trench right now.
Buck up.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Pollwather,
Remind me who would have won had it not been for caucus states. And again remind me how many caucuses are going to allocate electoral votes in November.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
“inexperienced racist socialist”
inexperienced – 2 years as a US Senator
socialist – isn’t really a derogatory term outside of America…it’s hard to argue his policies are not socialism, particularly his healthcare proposals and insistence that the wealthy pay extreme taxes to support the poor as a form of wealth redistribution
racist – this is really the only point you have *any* ground to oppose, and it’s hardly nonsensical given that he sat in Trinity for 20+ years which preaches black liberation theology (which itself is racist and rooted in marxism)…combine this with his associations, his recorded comments about “typical white people” and “the white man’s greed” and it’s not really a huge stretch
And by the way, notice that I didn’t say we could win by calling him a racist…I noted that you hit him on 1) his associations and 2) his extreme liberal senate record.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
We don’t have to call him racist. It would just help if we could establish a pattern of behavior allowing others to conclude he is – or at the very least cause them to wonder about it while they’re alone in the booth.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
At this point I’m really tempted to start making youtube ads. The first would be “Obama wants healthcare for everyone, right?” then portions of his transcript denying healthcare for fetuses.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Houston – a better tack would be to highlight his inability to save the babies that were born after a botched abortion.
That would work. And I’m moderately pro-choice.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s national security advisor, said earlier today on CNN that Obama thinks Osama should be assumed guilty, and would prefer the alleged terror leader be killed, not captured, if found by our military; but if he were to surrender in the mountains of Afghanistan, Obama believes bin Laden should then be entitled, under the U.S. Constitution, to the presumption of innocence and granted a right of habeas corpus in American civilian courts. Is that a logically tenable position to hold?
June 18th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
CNN Video: Rudy Giuliani on Energy, Obama and the Gitmo Ruling
June 18th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Aron,
No it isn’t logical, which is why it is just the sort of thing McCain can use to beat Obama over the head in debates.
Just like you and others have alluded to before, Obama has given us enough material to force Obama’s hand on foreign policy. Either Obama is forced to blur the lines and look badly doing it because he is conceding to McCain, or Obama will have to stand up and account for his extremist foreign policy statements which will turn off many voters who don’t like Iraq, but still want a strong foreign policy.
The only problem is that McCain so terrible in debates that I fear Obama will run circles around him and make him seem like an angry bitter old man, who is either a warmongerer or confused.
June 18th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
CNN Video: Obama’s security advisor offers conflicting responses to handling Osama
June 18th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
I just thought I should share the October 29th 2004 Ohio poll that showed Kerry winning. National polls matter at this point.
http://www.surveyusa.com/2004_Elections/OH041026pressen.pdf
June 18th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
This is scary chewck out these links….Obama is thinking about Jones as a VP, but he forgot to check to see who he was supporting this election.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/06/18/obama_vp_mention_campaigns_for.html
Oh and if anyone has doubt that McCain is picking a right-wing Conservative VP, read this; http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/18/opinion/main4190265.shtml
June 18th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
[...] has Obama up 49-44 in the Sunshine [...]
June 18th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
# 1 Kevin. You are exactly the kind of Republican I hate.
How can you possibly say as an American that loves his country ” I hope the enxt President will be garbage…”
June 18th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
We should pray Obama does a great job.
June 19th, 2008 at 11:49 am
People need to understand, the doom and gloom isn’t about the polling data. It’s about the candidate. One can change, the other is inalterable.