On MSNBC this morning, in-house polling guru Chuck Todd told the Morning Joe panel that the race had reached a "tipping point," with tonight's vice-presidential debate looming as something of a must-win for John McCain. Polling trends "should really scare the McCain campaign," Todd said, adding, "he needs something, anything to stop this Obama momentum. Now, all the pressure is being put on Sarah Palin...not just for her own persona but to save the McCain campaign."
Palin's recent troubles with Katie Couric aside, that could be a tall order. In a chat at the Washington Post's website yesterday, FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver and Pollster.com's Charles Franklin captured Palin's status as a game-changer thusly:
Nate Silver: The one area where Palin seems to have helped McCain is in the *rural* west, by which I mean states like Montana, North Dakota and (of course) Alaska, all states where Obama had hoped to compete before. States like Colorado and Nevada, by the way, should *not* be described as rural, since most of their population lives in cities.
But I don't think she's been a help to McCain most anywhere else on the map. For a little bit, it looked like she was helping him win over some pro-life moderate Catholics in Pennsylvania and perhaps Wisconsin, but the PA polls are now swinging back to Obama pretty rapidly.
Charles Franklin: She seems to have moved white women in the Rep direction pretty strongly after the RNC, but that has now come back by half, to about a 6-8 point McCain lead. Interestingly white men didn't react to Palin but have now moved towards Obama since the financial crisis arose.
Todd said that Palin's success depended on her making her opponent, Joe Biden, the central topic of conversation tomorrow, whether through a gaffe of his own making or a "memorable line" of her own.
Todd went on to express some skepticism of Obama's reported wide lead in Virginia, but offered up a bellwether for observers to track in the next week: "If John McCain is campaigning in Missouri later this week, that's not a good sign. You shouldn't have to be worrying about Missouri at this point."
[WATCH.]
Meanwhile, a New York Times poll finds more bad news for McCain:
A CBS News poll released Wednesday found that Mr. Obama's favorability rating, at 48 percent, is the highest it has ever been in polls conducted by CBS and The New York Times. At the same time, the number of voters who hold an unfavorable view of Mr. McCain -- 42 percent -- is as high as it has been since CBS News and The Times began asking the question about Mr. McCain in 1999, the first time he ran for president.