Democratic consultant Robert Creamer, author of this campaign’s political strategy “it” book, has an insightful HuffPo article, “Ten Key Steps to Put Obama Over the Top In November.” In one of the most interesting steps (#5), he urges:

…we also need mass mobilization that relies on “chain reaction contact” — where campaign activity explodes virally — geometrically — to involve millions and millions of self-initiating campaign activists. We need a campaign where millions of Americans wear Obama buttons, where people self-report to walk precincts and use online voter contact tools in droves.
Obama’s primary campaign provides a model, but now that model needs to explode into a social movement that defines the identity of its participants in the way the civil rights and anti-war movements did for an earlier generation. When they consider their role in this campaign, activists need to think about their participation the way volunteers in the civil rights movement thought about their roles at Selma — that they will proudly tell their kids and grandkids that they were there — that they played a part — in the transformational 2008 presidential election.
Obama has an inspirational message, and his campaign has a culture that could actually seed that kind of movement. And it is that kind of movement that could change the electorate so fundamentally that it makes states that are unthinkably Red into Blue states this fall.

A provocative idea, and one which plays to a unique Obama strength — and to a huge blind spot of our adversaries, as James Vega pointed out in a recent TDS post. Creamer’s article has several other ideas that merit support.

When I got my “stimulus” check from the federal government, like any good American, I decided to do my patriotic duty and buy something. I am now the proud owner of a 40 inch, 1080p Samsung HD-TV. It’s beautiful.
But there are a couple of funny things about watching television in high definition. First, you can’t really hide anything in HD — the wrinkles, blemishes, age spots, and scars all seem too vivid. Second, you start paying attention to those imperfections whenever you watch video — whether its on HD or not.
That’s especially true if you’re John McCain. This technology is just so unkind to him.
This being the Internet, I’m not the first person to make this observation.
But seeing McCain tonight offset by Barack Obama was almost painfully jarring. From the content to the venues to the sheer physical presence of each man, the two speeches could not have been more different. And I was watching MSNBC’s standard feed. When these two men debate in the fall, on the HD channels of each network, the visual contrast will positively pop off the screen.
There’s no way to deny that McCain wears a lifetime of hardships on his face, and I don’t write this to make light of his well-documented and often-heroic times of suffering. The man is former prisoner of war and a cancer survivor — he’s earned his scars and wrinkles. But the image that they create is a hurdle his campaign must now overcome.
I’d love to see some consumer data outlining the penetration of high def televisions among likely voters. Maybe the campaigns have those numbers, and that is why the Republicans aren’t scared. The prices of these televisions, however, keep coming down, and people keep buying them.
That fact makes it awfully hard for me to picture eight years of a McCain presidency, with everyone watching him age before our eyes in 30,000:1 contrast ratios.

In case you made an early night of it, Barack Obama won MT, wrapped up a majority of delegates, and claimed the nomination at a festive, SRO event in MN. Hillary Clinton won SD, claimed a total-popular-vote victory, did not acknowledge Obama’s delegate count, and said she’d decide next steps later, at what can only be described as a defiant event in NY. The TV networks spent a lot of time debating the meaning of HRC’s actions, with interpretations ranging from a short-term facing-saving measure to a power play to compel Obama to ask her onto the ticket.
We’ll have a lot more later today.

Since my earlier post today, a lot has been happening in the Democratic presidential contest. The cascade of superdelegate endorsements of Barack Obama that a lot of observers expected for tomorrow or later in the week is happening right now, and having already bagged more than twenty today, Obama now appears in excellent position to claim victory tonight.
Meanwhile, there’s mass confusion in media reports on Hillary Clinton’s plans for tonight, with some saying she’ll acknowledge Obama as the nominee, and others saying “Hell, no!” she won’t. To top it all off, there’s another report that HRC told a group of NY legislators today that she’d volunteer to form a “Unity Ticket” with Obama.
All this turmoil suggests that Obama’s going to have quite a party in MN tonight, and that HRC’s speech in NY will get a lot of attention. The poor voters of SD and MT, meanwhile, will have a hard time getting their primaries noticed.

It’s hard to believe that Sen. John McCain used to known as a champion of campaign finance reform.
Back in February, he used some questionable legal maneuvering (and the complete helplessness of a quorum-lacking Federal Elections Commission) to wiggle out of his previous commitment to accepting public matching funds for the presidential primary.
Now the Washington Post reports that the Republican nominee may have used a nonprofit to provide some serious public relations support to his presidential bid: :

For weeks, Republican presidential candidate John McCain had been hammered for supporting the Air Force’s February decision to award a $40 billion contract for refueling tankers to Northrop Grumman and its European partner. Democrats, labor unions and others blamed the senator for a deal they say could move tens of thousands of jobs abroad.
McCain’s advisers wanted to strike back against key Democratic critics. But they did not mount an expensive advertising campaign to defend the candidate’s position. They called a tax-exempt nonprofit closely aligned with the senator from Arizona, seeking information and help.

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) immediately came to the senator’s aid — working with Northrop to organize a multi-faceted public relations campaign which just happened to support McCain’s position.
Both the nonprofit and McCain’s campaign maintain that no election laws have been broken, but of course, this isn’t all that CAGW has done to support the Arizona senator. Its political arm endorsed McCain in February, and its lobbying organization has given more than $11,000 to the Republican since 2004.
And if that wasn’t enough, CAGW is also tied to Jack Abramoff.
Two years ago, staffers for the Senate Finance Committee investigated the nonprofit and concluded that the organization’s emails “show a pattern of CAGW producing public relations materials favorable to Mr. Abramoff’s clients.”
Delightful.

If you are a hard-core fan of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, or of the Detroit Pistons, you might want to stop reading right now. But for purely aesthetic reasons, we’re passing along a link to a savagely funny piece by TNR’s Christopher Orr, speaking in the voice of Pistons’ GM Joe Dumars, demanding a seventh game against the Boston Celtics for the NBA Eastern Conference championship. You don’t have to accept the accuracy of this “sports parable” to appreciate the craftmanship.

Today marks the final two primaries in the Democratic presidential nominating contest (we can pause here for a final horselaugh at those, myself included, who spent months last year deploring the “front-loaded” primary/caucus calendar, and predicting a too-early conclusion). But as the votes are counted in SD and MT, most of the action will be elsewhere: in MN, where Barack Obama is planning a victory rally tonight in the very venue of the Republican National Convention in September; in NY, where Hillary Clinton’s immediate plans will be revealed; and in DC, where we can expect a steady series of superdelegate announcements in Obama’s favor.
Those last voters out west could complicate things a bit. For weeks, it’s been assumed that MT and SD are Obama Country. But the entire Clinton family has been relentlessly campaigning in SD during the last couple of weeks, and a rare poll of the state (from that frequent outlier-producer, ARG) has Clinton ahead there by an astonishing 26 points. MT may be closer than earlier expected as well.
But the real issue for Obama is how rapidly he gains the superdelegate endorsements that will certainly, within a few days if not tonight, put him across the threshold of the 2,118 delegates needed to claim a majority. According to a good Washington Post summary of the state of the race, Obama’s also planning a big northern Virginia rally for Thursday night, where he can show off some new big-name superdelegate supporters, and formally claim victory if he doesn’t do so tonight.
The Clinton camp has put out a variety of mixed signals about what she plans to say and do tonight, and in the days just ahead: she can stay in, withdraw and endorse Obama, or (and I’ve thought for a while this was where she was heading) “suspend” active campaigning while keeping her options open for Denver. There’s no particular reason to think she’ll do anything until Obama’s nailed down a majority, but at that point, a suspension would enable her to keep up a quiet but intense campaign among superdelegates; consider support for a MI or FL Credentials Committee challenge of the DNC decision to halve their voting strength; and most of all, hope for a raft of polls showing Obama in deep trouble in the general election. She could also, of course, withdraw at any point between now and the Convention, particularly if Obama’s general election prospects actually rise, and pressure from party poohbahs for a unity gesture and a “healing” interval become intense.
It’s not at all clear what impact HRC’s immediate plans will have on her core supporters, particularly those who have become convinced of late that she’s been unfairly denied the nomination by media bias for Obama and/or premature pressure to end her campaign. But the signals both candidate send tonight and over the next week or so will be carefully watched by the considerable array of party leaders who want the competition to be over, and any competitor to the putative nominee out.

Kos-poster Meteorblades gets medeival on so-called ‘Democrats’ who say they are going to vote for McCain because their candidate isn’t getting nominated. The whole article is worth a read, but this excerpt in particular lays out cold what such a vote would really mean:

…you McCainocrats are premeditating ballot support for an exclusive club of racist, union-busting, woman-suppressing, bedroom-peering, rights-scoffing, warmongering, torture-backing, buccaneering, global warming-denying, privatizing, public land-grabbing, Supreme Court stuffing, empire-building, Constitution-shredding raptors. All for self-indulgent revenge. You’re unhappy that your candidate has not won the nomination. I understand that. Mine didn’t win either. But you’re not just unhappy, you’re also willing to contribute to the election of someone who stands against most of what your candidate has been promoted as standing for. That, I don’t comprehend at all. Emotionally, intellectually or morally…

‘Nuff said. Apparently ‘Blades has struck a nerve here, with some 872 comments thus far.

As the primary season comes to a close and the focus turns to the battle between the nominees apparent, it seems like a good time to wonder which, if any, tools have a credible track record in predicting the outcome of presidential races. In his post at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Alan I. Abramowitz argues that, yes, there is one device that has a very impressive track record, and one better than horse race polls — the “electoral barometer.” Abramowitz says of early horse race polls:

The problem…is that they are not very accurate predictors of the actual election results. Polls in the spring of 1988 showed Michael Dukakis with a comfortable lead over George H.W. Bush and polls in June of 1992 showed Bill Clinton running third behind both Bush and H. Ross Perot. So recent polls showing a close race between McCain and Obama may not tell us much about what to expect in November.

There is a better way to go, as Abramowitz explains:

Instead of using early horserace polls, political scientists generally rely on measures of the national political climate to make their forecasts. That is because the national political climate can be measured long before the election and it has been found to exert a powerful influence on the eventual results.
Three indicators of the national political climate have accurately predicted the outcomes of presidential elections since the end of World War II: the incumbent president’s approval rating at mid-year, the growth rate of the economy during the second quarter of the election year, and the length of time the president’s party has held the White House.
…These three factors can be combined to produce an Electoral Barometer score that measures the overall national political climate. The formula for computing this score is simply the president’s net approval rating (approval minus disapproval) in the Gallup Poll plus five times the annual growth rate of real GDP minus 25 if the president’s party has held the White House for two terms or longer. Mathematically, this formula can be written as:
EB = NAR + (5*GDP) – 25.
…A positive Electoral Barometer reading generally predicts victory for the incumbent party while a negative reading generally predicts defeat.

As for the track record, Abramowitz notes:

The Electoral Barometer has predicted the winner of the popular vote in 14 of the 15 presidential elections since World War II. There were five elections in which the Electoral Barometer was negative and the president’s party lost the popular vote in all five of these elections: 1952, 1960, 1976, 1980, and 1992. There were ten elections in which the Electoral Barometer was positive, and the president’s party won the popular vote in nine of these elections: 1948, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1984, 1988, 1996, 2000, and 2004.

Not too shabby. Abramowitz points out that the second quarter GDP figures needed to fill out the electoral barometer formula won’t be available until August. But preliminary stats look very encouraging for Dems:

…Based on President Bush’s net approval rating in the most recent Gallup Poll (-39), the annual growth rate of the economy during the first quarter of 2008 (+0.6 percent), and the fact that the Republican Party has controlled the White House for the past eight years, the current Electoral Barometer reading is a dismal -63.

Abramowitz argues that such an electoral barometer reading would result in a “decisive defeat” for the GOP, which could only be avoided in “an upset of unprecedented magnitude.” The ‘smart money’ crowd at Intrade.com, which also has a more impressive track record than early horse-race polls, seems to agree, with a 61.0 bid for Obama vs. 37.2 for McCain.

One of the key political terms in which variable definitions cause a lot of confusion is “battleground states.” In the context of a presidential general election, the term ultimately means states that the two major party candidates target with time and money, particularly as election day nears. In earlier stages of the presidential cycle, the term is more speculative, as reflected in the inveterate promises of this or that candidate to “expand the battleground” by placing more states into play. Early general election polling–particularly now that state-by-state polls have become more common–is often the source of such speculation; that’s why you hear talk from the Obama campaign that the Democrat will at least throw a scare into McCain in such previously invulnerable GOP bastions as Georgia or North Carolina, and why McCainiacs like to tout outlier polls showing him well ahead in PA or competitive in CA.
Over at OpenLeft, Chris Bowers has made an effort to identify the likely 2008 battleground states by a more scientific method: using the close 2004 race as the baseline, and adjusting the numbers to reflect recent demographic trends, with the final ranking also reflecting polling evidence and common sense. Chris also takes the simple but often forgotten step of stipulating a very close general election, not just because he thinks that’s likely, but because the very term “battleground” becomes misleading in an electoral blowout. That’s why he assigns such states as Florida and Pennsylvania–almost invariably described as battleground states in most lists–to McCain and Obama, respectively, on the theory that if McCain’s leading in PA or Obama’s leading in FL down the homestretch, the candidate is probably going to be well ahead nationally. (He also views IA and MN as Obama states in a close race, and WV and MO as McCain states in a close race). This doesn’t mean the campaigns will ignore such states in the general election; it is, instead, a prediction of where the big effort will and won’t be made in the final push.
Chris comes up with a list of eight likely battleground states, with five (CO, NH, OH, NM and WI) leaning to Obama, and three (MI, NV and VA) leaning to McCain.
You can quibble with his list, which Chris acknowleges as very preliminary, but it is based on a sound methodology that generally avoids the pro-Obama temptations of overinterpreting positive 2006 election results or making outlandish assumptions about turnout, and the pro-McCain temptation of giving the Arizonan a thumb on the scales in every state where Obama did poorly in this year’s primaries.
One important point that Chris doesn’t explicitly address, but that we might as well get used to, is the recurring possibility of an election in which the popular vote winner loses the electoral vote, and thus the election. It obviously happened (with an assist from the Supreme Court) to the benefit of Republicans in 2000, and could well have happened to the benefit of Democrats in 2004 (in the latter case because Kerry’s percentage margin of defeat in states like OH, IA and NM was a lot smaller than his overall popular vote deficit). Given the likelihood that Obama will run better in solid red states than is usual for a Democrat, you’d have to guess–and it is just a guess–that he’s the more likely victim of this sort of miscarriage of political justice. But you wage election campaigns with the system you have, and those who fear an electoral vote/popular vote split better get behind the state-based National Popular Vote initiative (which would reward EVs to the national popular vote winner) pronto.