Show your support.
Buzz this article up.
The media fascination with the daily head-to-head between Senators Obama and Clinton is somewhat humorous to me, because it begins to take on the feeling of who wins goes on to be president. Not so.
The most important indicator of where the election is heading is the long-term trends -- not the daily polls -- in all voters' preferences between Obama v. McCain and Clinton v. McCain. That long-term view gives us the best indicator of where an extended primary is taking the Democratic party, and where the party can expect to start off the general election, if they end it at the convention, a mere two months before Election Day.
Barring any cataclysmic event (like there is a violent extremist coup in Iraq, or one of the candidates gets arrested for torturing kittens), there will be a lot of ups and downs in the daily polls, but the long-term trend lines go from ugly, to uglier, to ugliest for Democrats. Is it any wonder that Joe Scarborough has spent every morning on his show trying to push the idea that this should go all the way to Denver?
Let's just look at the graphic evidence. Here's the last month of Rasmussen Report's head-to-heads.
You can see, it's a little tough to tell what's going on when you look at all the daily up and down action. As everyone likes to say when they dismiss polls, polling is just a snapshot in time. But, a month is a pretty good indicator of where things are going. So let's smooth this out and look at the one-month trend line.
Now you get a better idea as to where Democrats have gone over the last month, as they "bloody up" each other, as Rush Limbaugh has hoped for with glee. That's the uglier.
Let's now peek at the ugliest. By extending the trend lines through to the convention, which assumes no mortal blows along the way (but Obama and Clinton beating each other up, while John McCain builds his infrastructure out and goes on unchallenged PR tours), a very scary picture emerges.
To make matters worse, while the trend lines in reality could be off by a few points than on this chart, an ugly convention most likely plummet Democratic numbers ensuring they're on the low end of the trend, leaving Democrats with an even worse deficit to overcome with just two months to campaign. For those who think it's impossible that Democrats will ever do this poorly in polls, who would have thought that a Republican would even sniff a Democrat's jock this year in the prez race? And yet, they are.
Unchallenged and undefined by the Democrats' side, John McCain should only drive his numbers up, while infighting brings the Democrats down. After five more long months of it, it's not at all outrageous to say that Dems could find themselves in a 30 point hole or worse. With some awesome campaigning, they could make it respectable during a 2 month campaign, like maybe a 10 point loss or so. But I wouldn't lay any money down on a win.
Bill Clinton's yukking it up around the country, telling everyone to "chill out" because no matter what happens "we're going to win." The problem is, the longer Bill Clinton laughs it off, the greater chance we'll all be crying on a cold Tuesday night in early November.
Loading comments…
Posted April 1, 2008 | 11:43 AM (EST)