The previous staff post discussed one element of Barack Obama’s new-voter strategy, his historic strength among young voters. There’s some fascinating new evidence about the magnitude of his appeal to another element, African-American voters.
Via Jim Galloway of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, we learn that state election officials (from data required by the Voting Right Act) estimate that nearly 40% of early voters in Georgia as of last week were African-Americans. Black voters represent 29% of registered voters in the state, a figure that’s up sharply this year because nearly half of new voter registrations this year have been among African-Americans.
At fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver uses these numbers to conduct a very useful demonstration of the potential impact of two interrelated phenomena: potentially historic African-American turnout combined with margins for Barack Obama that are unlike anything seen since Reconstruction. (This second factor, the almost universally ignored phenomenon of African-American swing voters, is something I discussed a while back in the context of Virginia).
Stipulating that Obama will carry 95% of the black vote (which is what most national polls indicate) and 30% of the “nonblack” vote (whites, Hispanics and Asians) in Georgia, Silver shows what various levels of black turnout would do to John McCain’s relatively strong lead in recent polls of the state:

[S]uppose that black and nonblack voters each turn out at the same rates as they did in 2004, but that we account for the increase in black registration. According to our math, John McCain’s 7.0-point lead is now cut to 4.9 points.
But that is probably too conservative an assumption. Newly-registered voters — and nearly half of Georgia’s newly-registered voters are black — turn out at higher rates than previously registered voters. In addition, one would assume that the opportunity to vote for the first African-American nominee might be just a little bit of a motivating factor for black voters. Suppose that African-Americans represent 29.0 percent of Georgia’s turnout, matching their share of active registrations. Using the splits we described above, McCain’s lead is now cut to 2.3 points.
Even this, however, may be too conservative. For one thing, the registration window in Georgia is not yet over … it concludes today. The statistics I cited above only reflected registrations through September 30. There is typically a surge of registrations in the final few days before the deadline. In 2004, Georgia’s active voter rolls increased by about 150,000 persons in the first four days of October, before the registration deadline closed. That was more than they’d increased in the entire month of September.
So suppose that by tonight, black voters have increased to 30 percent of Georgia’s registered voter pool. Plugging that 30 percent number in, McCain’s advantage is a mere 1 point.

Looking at the early voting figures, Silver concludes that “Barack Obama is winning Georgia right now.”
Now I don’t think Nate Silver, or anyone else, is ready to actually predict that result, particularly since the Obama campaign has taken Georgia off its target list of battleground states. But as Silver notes, the evidence from Georgia may be important in terms of what could happen in closer states–VA and NC, certainly, and perhaps FL and even IN–with sizable African-American populations. A significant surge in African-American voting levels, combined with historic margins for Obama, could be decisive on November 4, and also represent bad news for down-ballot Republicans in those states.

My one gripe about our otherwise great Democratic convention is that the soundtrack was a little short on country music for a party that aspires to make some inroads into working-class America. Well, Kathy G over at The G Spot has a post that more than makes up for it — a video/radio clip of Ralph Stanley’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Yes, THE Ralph Stanley, the King of Bluegrass, who practically owns ‘the high lonesome sound’. And just for kicks, Kathy throws in four of Stanley’s best videos. Here’s hoping the Obama campaign shows Stanley’s endorsement all over rural America, not just VA. Way Cool.

Todd Beeton has a MyDD post on Senator McCain’s three plane crashes as emblematic of the GOP nominee’s erratic behavior going back more than four decades. But the best part of Beeton’s post is the quote from Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) on Fox News Sunday. Here’s Beeton’s set-up of Senator McCaskill’s quote:

The media has been clutching its pearls over the Obama campaign’s use of the word “erratic” when describing McCain presumably because of an ageism subtext, but these tales make clear that in the case of John MCCain, erratic behavior is not a function of his advanced years, rather it’s simply a quality of his character. From the young McCain’s cockpit antics to the last 2 weeks of wacky behavior on the campaign trail, as Claire McCaskill eloquently documented on Fox News Sunday yesterday.

And the McCaskill quote:

Now, on the other hand, if you look at what Barack Obama’s ad says, it’s just talking about what John McCain did the last two weeks. He was erratic. One day, no bailout. The next day, a bailout. One day, “I’m suspending my campaign.” The next day, “I’m not.”
One day, “I’m going to debate.” The next day, “I’m not going to debate.” The next day, I go ahead and debate. One day, “I’m not going to leave Washington until we have a deal,” and then he’s on a plane out of Washington after the deal’s kind of blown up. So it really — there has been a lot of erratic behavior.

It appears that the ‘erratic’ meme is sticking to Senator McCain. A mirror image meme seems to be settling on McCain’s opponent. On another Sunday yak show, ABC News This Week, conservative George Will observed almost admiringly that Senator Obama has earned the nickname ‘No Drama Obama,’ which is more suggestive of the solid, steady and prudent leadership needed to end the war and navigate America through the current economic and energy crises.

Yes, everyone know that younger voters are part of Barack Obama’s electoral “base,” but it’s sometimes hard to grasp the sheer magnitude of Obama’s popularity among “millenials.” A new survey by USA Today/MTV and Gallup helps.
Here’s the bottom line, from Susan Page:

A USA TODAY/MTV/Gallup Poll of registered voters 18 to 29 years old shows Democrat Barack Obama leading Republican John McCain by 61%-32%, the most lopsided contest within an age group in any presidential election in modern times.

“Modern times” means since 1976, when publicly released exit polling began. John Kerry won under-30 voters by an 11 point margin. In case you’re bad at arithmetic, Obama’s margin in this new survey is 29%.
Clearly, John McCain’s problems with young voters weren’t helped by his selection of 44-year-old Sarah Palin–the youngest candidate on either ticket–as his running-mate. In the new survey, Palin’s favorable-unfavorable rating is 25/46 (McCain’s is 43/45; Obama’s is 71/23; and Biden’s is 43/35), and 55% of these under-30 voters think Palin’s not qualified to become president.
The size of the under-30 vote will, of course, determine its value to Obama. In the Democratic primaries, the percentage of the overall vote cast by under-30 voters nearly doubled from 2000, the last year with competitive primaries. The new voter registration numbers are certainly impressive: In Virginia, for example, which Bush won by 260,000 votes in 2004, there are more than 300,000 new voters on the rolls, and 41% of them are under 25.

New Democracy Corps surveys of 1,000 LV’s nationally and 1,044 LV’s in the battleground states conducted 9/28-30 bring good news for the Obama campaign — “the first real, sustainable lead of the presidential race.”

Obama has taken a 4-point lead nationally, but more important, he leads by 6 points in the presidential battleground states (50 to 44 percent). This lead represents a 10-point swing in the battleground states that Kerry lost by 4 points in 2004 – a comparable swing to what congressional Democrats achieved in 2006.

In the DCorps survey memo, Stan Greenberg and James Carville explain,

…the race has changed in fundamental ways in the last two weeks – and not necessarily for the most obvious reason, the economy and financial crisis. Obama’s gains as a person and leader as well as gains on national security, contrasted with McCain’s negativity, political maneuvering and failure to take the Republicans with him, have changed the dynamic of the race.

In the pivotal battleground states, McCain leads among white men 51-41 percent, while Obama leads among white women by a margin of 50-44 percent. But Dems have a 51-43 lead in generic House races.

Democrats who were hoping to see Sarah Palin fall flat on her face last Thursday and who were surprised by her performance had failed to note a key line in her resume – that she had worked as a sportscaster on TV.
Had they thought about it a bit they would have realized that the format of the VP debate – quite different from the probing of a one-on-one interview – would powerfully favor any candidate who had been trained in the modern “happy talk” format of local news – a format in which the newscaster, weather reporter and sportscaster are paid to bubble, giggle and chit-chat cheerfully with each other, to mug shamelessly into the camera and to generally project a “gosh we’re just having the best good old time of our lives delivering the local news” kind of attitude. Winks are not mandatory, but – along with cutsy-poo nose crinkles and manic eyebrow raising – they are not all that uncommon either.
If you found yourself wondering “where did Palin learn to do those moves?”, go out and rent “Up Close and Personal” – a 1990’s movie depicting TV veteran Robert Redford teaching rookie weathergirl Michelle Pfeiffer how to project warmth, confidence and animation on the small screen. You will have a painful but salutary “aha” moment when you see the some of the backstage mechanics behind the apparently effortless projection of onscreen energy, vitality and spunky charm.
Here’s one simple example – injecting animation and excitement into the voice. Listen to some of the debate again (if you can stand it) and note the way Palin’s voice rises and falls within every sentence and how she always puts emphasis on at least one word. It’s almost as if every fifth or sixth word is underlined. The effect is to convey both conviction and excitement.
To see how important this is, say the sentence “I really like peas” out loud, first putting strong emphasis on the word “really” and then on the word “like.” Although the underlying words are exactly the same, when spoken aloud the first sentence conveys something like “I’m not kidding here, I genuinely love those darn things” while the second sentence conveys something more like “I know lots of people are indifferent about peas but I personally think they are great” It is these subtle differences in tone and emphasis that create the impression of energy and freshness in spoken communication.
Palin is certainly not the first Republican politician to have been underestimated by Democrats because they do not understand the mechanics of TV. In the 1980 campaign and during his first year in office, Ronald Reagan was widely ridiculed and dismissed by Democrats because he carried around 3 x 5 cards with little sound-bites for the cameras (“Sound-bites” weren’t even called that until Reagan established them and got them recognized as a distinct political art form) and for his penchant for using personal anecdotes and stories rather than facts and data.
Many Democrats saw these things as evidence of his lack of experience and sophistication while Reagan – who had years of experience as a TV announcer and commercial pitchman in the 50’s – ripped through them like a buzz saw out of hell because he knew more about how to effectively engage TV viewers and form a bond with them then all his critics put together.
Reagan also perfected the entirely fictional TV character – “the ordinary, common-sense American goes to Washington to shake things up” that Sarah Palin is now channeling. Before Reagan, politicians always played this role as a demagogue – performed by bitter and nasty men like George Wallace, Richard Nixon Spiro Agnew and Pat Buchannan – men seething with resentment and anger. It was Reagan who created a different image of the conservative outsider – as an optimistic, cheerful and sunny visitor from the wholesome world of the “real” America. This is the role which first George Bush and now Sarah Palin have reprised for a new TV audience (Palin, in fact, was rather blatantly trying to use almost the entire big bag of vintage Reagan chops in last week’s VP debate – right down to his signature phrase “there you go again”. An excellent final essay for Media Studies classes this year would be “name all the classic Ronald Reagan tropes that Sarah Palin used in her VP debate” – anything less than eight items should be a D)
Let’s face it. It’s time Democrats stopped being blindsided by this stuff. There is almost nothing in Sarah Palin’s bag of tricks that Reagan didn’t use to great effect on Carter, Mondale and others 30 years ago (except perhaps for an occasional whiff of Reese Witherspoon in full speed plucky-spunky “if I am elected Miss Alaska” final speech uplift mode). We have to get serious about studying and understanding the media rather than wishing politics was still conducted like the Lincoln-Douglass debates.
Like the old saying goes, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
You betcha, goshdarnit.

As you probably know by now, the House passed the revised financial bailout–excuse me! rescue–bill today by a surprisingly large 263-171 margin. Dems voted for it 172-63, while Republicans still rejected it, though by a smaller margin than before, 91-108. That means 32 Democrats and 26 Republicans flipped.
Looking at the results, which showed a very diverse and sufficient number of Democrats getting behind the bailout, you do have to wonder if a Dems-only strategy might have worked, at least in the House. A clear majority of House flippers were from the Progressive Caucus and (especially) the Congressional Black Caucus ranks, and those Blue Dogs (four by a quick count) who flipped despite the budget-busting Senate tax sweeteners, and perhaps a few others, might well have gone for a fiscally sound progressive alternative. Maybe such an alternative would have never gotten through the Senate, but you do have to consider the road not taken.

Governor Sarah Palin did better in the veep debate than many expected, but all the polls and serious commentators agree that Biden won it by any reasonable set of measures. Now it seems fair to ask, is Sarah Palin going to do Meet the Press and other more in-depth interview shows, as has Biden and every other veep candidate since the early days of television? Or are the pundits just going to shrugg it off? Biden, one of the most frequent MTP guests in the progam’s history, raised the issue when he last appeared on the program, explains HuffPo‘s Sam Stein:

On NBC’s Meet the Press, Biden told Tom Brokaw, “Eventually, she’s going to have to sit in front of you like I’m doing and have done. Eventually, she’s going to have to answer questions and not be sequestered. Eventually, she’s going to have to answer on the record.” Later, Brokaw told viewers he had reached out to the Delaware Democrat’s Republican counterpart to no avail.l

We’re still waiting. A couple of interviews with anchors doesn’t get it. The debate was good, as far as it went. But the format didn’t allow much time for for tough follow-up questions. Are the better news interview shows (Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation etc.) now going to roll over and give her a free pass? The pundits — not just two network anchors — should have a chance to interview her in depth, if the McCain-Palin campaign is serious about her capabilities and if they care about serving the public interest.

Even as most political observers were focused on events in Congress or on the vice presidential debate, a small but important piece of hard campaign news came out yesterday: the McCain campaign has given up on the battleground state of Michigan.
According to Mike Allen of Politico, McCain’s strategists now say they must win in one of three battleground states won by both Gore and Kerry: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. RealClearPolitics’ polling averages currently show Obama up by eight percentage points in PA, and by five points in WI and MN.
While polls can change, the decision to pull ads and other resources out of a key state like Michigan is a real event with serious consequences. Some of you may remember Al Gore’s fateful decision late in the 2000 campaign to give up on Ohio, and significantly reduce resources in Gore’s home state of Tennessee, in order to go for broke in Florida. That move had consequences, all right.
The underyling reality is that McCain’s options are rapidly shrinking. Taking the 2004 map as a baseline (and assuming, of course, a close race), he’s already all but lost one state carried by Bush, Iowa, where his decision to skip the Caucuses in both 2000 and 2008 probably doomed him from the get-go. He’s in varying degrees of trouble in four others: CO, NM, VA, and FL. And NC and IN are shaky as well. At the moment, NH is the only state won by Kerry where McCain’s in good shape. And now MI is off the board. So far as I know, the only previously targeted states that the Obama campaign has conceded are GA and ND, where Gore and Kerry were routed. And virtually everyone in politics agrees that Obama has a significant advantage in ground resources in all the battleground states, with the possible exception of FL.
At the moment, the McCain campaign’s overriding mission is to regain some national momentum by trying, through sheer nastiness, to shift attention from fears about the economy to doubts about Barack Obama, reinforced, they hope, by the other two debates. But the electoral vote map is not friendly to their candidate, which means he’s not likely to get any breaks in the close race the GOP is trying to engineer.

For the second time in a week, we had a candidate debate where most of the professional handicappers saw it one way, but voters seem to have seen it another way. And in both cases, that’s good news for the Obama-Biden ticket.
The consensus pundi-reaction to last Friday’s Obama-McCain debate was that the GOPer “won on points,” but the polls judged it an Obama win. And the exceptionally low expectations for Sarah Palin made her fluid performance last night a win or a draw, according to most accounts. But as this morning’s staff post indicated, both undecided voters and the general public thought Joe Biden did better.
What seems to be happening is that voters are beginning to interpret events like debates through the filter of increasingly settled preferences. A lot of them shake their heads just like I do the thirtieth time John McCain or Sarah Palin uses the word “maverick.” The Republican candidates did most definitely avoid any sort of disastrous mistakes in this round of debates, but that’s about all you can say for them.
There is, of course, a full month left in this very long campaign, and it’s clear the McCain campaign is about to launch the Mother of All Negative Campaigns as soon as the immediate financial crisis abates, if it ever does. But with early voting already under way in a number of key states, opinions are beginning to settle, with Obama in the lead.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

In the Couric interview, Palin mangled her talking points so badly that all anybody noticed noticed was the mangling itself; the points themselves receded into the background. Her much-improved performance last night, though, had the paradoxical effect of throwing the weakness of the GOP message in this election cycle into sharper relief.

The bottom line in both our takes is that voters are beginning to react to what the candidates are saying, in a critical way, instead of focusing, as the handicappers always do, on how they say it. The steak really does ultimately matter more than the sizzle.