I’d been meaning to touch on this, and a new poll gives me a reason to. We spend most of our time tracking the campaigns in the battleground states and analyzing poll data there. And across the board Obama is doing very well in the states that will decide the election.
But what about the states where Obama is a cinch to win? How well is he doing there compared to historical norms? Margin of victory in individual states (and believe me, I don’t want to count chickens prematurely) is a factor in measuring the size and strength of the mandate Obama looks poised to win.
I have in mind in particular California, where Obama is wildly popular, but where there is a record of Republican presidential candidates having done very well, too. So how does Obama’s lead there stack up to Reagan’s victory margin, for example? Very well, it turns out.
The latest Field Poll gives Obama a 22-point lead in California, which would be an unprecedented margin of victory in modern times:
Barack Obama appears destined for the largest California victory of any presidential candidate since World War II, potentially boosting prospects for Democratic candidates statewide.
In a new state Field Poll, the presidential ticket of Obama and Delaware Sen. Joe Biden leads Republican John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin by 55 percent to 33 percent.
If the margin stands on Nov. 4, Obama will rack up a California landslide more lopsided than that of Democrat Lyndon Johnson in 1964 or Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.
The Field Poll isn’t exactly an outlier. The Pollster.com aggregate for California gives Obama an 18-point lead, which is slightly larger than Reagan’s 1980 victory margin there. (The Pollster.com aggregate doesn’t yet include the new Field Poll, and it should be noted that there has been relatively little polling in California because the state is not in play.)
How’s Obama doing in other deep blue states? Again using the Pollster.com aggregate: New York (+24) and Massachusetts (+21). In 1988, Michael Dukakis only won his home state by 8 points.
John McCain concedes that Barack Obama isn’t really a socialist. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.
I want to throw this open for reader discussion, but up front let me say that talk of political mandates is one of those DC parlor games that often doesn’t mean very much. We’ll probably be referring to the 1990s as the Bill Clinton era for a long time, even though he never won a majority of the popular vote. George W. Bush showed that you can aggressively, and for a time successfully, seize the reins of power even if you barely ascended to the presidency.
But it’s been a generation since Reagan’s 1984 landslide, and I think there’s a tendency to forget the impact, real and imagined, of a sweeping victory of the kind Obama appears poised to win. (It’s worth noting too that in 1984, while we’d just come through a recession and the Cold War was still hot, there was nothing like the unsettledness that the financial crisis and overseas military engagements are causing now.)
You’re already seeing signs of the impact of the expectation of an Obama win. McCain is going all out to try to win this thing, but let’s be honest, his party is not. You don’t have to look too closely to see GOP officeholders running for cover, and not just from Bush, McCain, and Palin — but from specific policies and tactics, too. As the political tsunami approaches the beach, it’s every one for himself.
But all that being said, what will an Obama landslide translate into in the first year he’s in office? It’s not clear to me. One of the most toxic effects of the decline of the two parties as political institutions and the rise of the modern TV-based political campaign, with its cult of personality politics, is that the election becomes a referendum on the candidates themselves, rather than on broad policies or platforms.
The peril of the modern political campaign is not its nastiness (come on, we’re all adults). It’s that it supplants a real debate, so that by the time the election actually happens and a victor is declared, it’s not entirely clear what we all collectively just decided. Did we just vote for universal health care, or against that cranky old man and his dimwitted running mate?
So given the terms of the debate this campaign season, the issues facing the country, and the mood of the electorate, and assuming we see an Obama landslide next Tuesday, what does Obama have a mandate for? Thoughts?
Late Update: We’ve set up an open thread at TPMCafe to continue the discussion.
One could say many things about the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) –a great source of news about news in general and topics of concern to Jews worldwide — but saying it is a hot bed of anti-semites or crazed Muslim terrorists is simply not one of them. Here, from their election blog, is a very helpful debunking of the smears and lies the McCain campaign has been spreading about Rashid Khalidi and the PLO.
I don’t feel quite right about saying I like this new pro-McCain ad from Let Freedom Ring, a Republican independent group. But for sheer bad faith, clumsy racial politics desperation and transparent moral poverty it may be one of my favorites.
So here’s the contest. Watch the ad. And then send us in a short translation of what the ad is really saying. We’ll publish the best entries …
New McCain Line: Obama’s taking your money to give to his welfare-lovin’ peeps.
Judis could see it yesterday before McCain uncorked this latest belch of his filth.
Just 5 days to go and the McCain people have been claiming a tightening of the polls of late. In today’s episode of TPMtv we break down the numbers and see if they have a case …
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.