Running Scared
04 August 2008 4:00 pm by psychodrew
Guest post by Psychodrew.
Just when you think you’ve got the presidential race figured out, something comes along to upend your carefully wrought conclusions. Mainstream media provided lavish coverage of Barack Obama’s trip abroad the week of July 21 and predicted he would get a bounce in the polls. Some of his supporters believe he has put the election away. Other observers employ the hackneyed and meaningless phrase, “it’s his to lose.”
The poll numbers tell a different and more nuanced story.
Today’s Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll puts Obama at 46% and McCain at 47%. After four days of tight polling, Gallup has Obama up over McCain 46-43, within the margin of error.
ElectoralVote.com gives Obama the advantage (316-209).
But a closer look–via Real Clear Politics–at the battleground states shows a closer race.
The race is tightening. It’s not a creation of the mainstream media. It’s reality. Is he still leading? Sure. But that lead is smaller. After the barrage of negative advertising from the McCain campaign, this was to be expected.
Is this necessarily a bad thing?
For most of 2007, the conventional wisdom was that Hillary was going to win the Democratic nomination. She had all the advantages. She was the inevitable nominee. Nobody took Obama seriously until the polls begin to tighten in December. Hillary ran as the nominee in waiting, the fortress candidate, assured of a resounding victory on Super Tuesday.
When that victory did not come, she changed her strategy and Hillary the Populist Warrior stepped out on stage. With her back to the wall, running scared, Hillary became a formidable candidate. After re-tooling her campaign, despite being dramatically outspent and dismissed by the MSM and the commentariat, she racked up victory after victory. On the day her opponent clinched the nomination, she won the South Dakota primary.
The point I’m making is that realizing the possibility of defeat made Hillary–and McCain, for that matter–a better candidate.
After Hillary conceded, Obama got a bounce in the polls. And he’s been widely seen as the front-runner ever since. “It’s his race to lose,” the commentariat has repeatedly told us. Have any of us seriously entertained the possibility of defeat since Hillary endorsed Obama? Has Obama?
There’s been some grumbling on our side of the blogosphere about how the mainstream media is talking down Obama’s numbers, trying to make the race seem closer than it actually is. The reality is that pollsters cannot declare a candidate in the lead if that lead is within the margin of error. That is the nature of statistics.
Does Obama still have the advantage? Of course. But we need to be careful about overstating that advantage. If the primaries showed us anything, it’s that over confidence is the enemy. Candidates run better if they are running scared, fighting for victory, rather than confidently running down the clock. Perhaps contemplating defeat, tasting that fear just one time, will make Barack Obama a better candidate, too.
