Closing the Enthusiasm Gap
HAYES, STEPHEN F.
Closing the Enthusiasm Gap McCain and Obama, by the numbers. BY STEPHEN F. HAYES About the time political reporters were sitting down to lunch on June 24, BlackBerries all over Washington...
...According to the L.A...
...In fact, McCain made that argument himself at a fundraiser in Las Vegas last week...
...There are signs the McCain campaign is beginning to understand the importance of conservatives...
...Where are they going to go...
...Unmotivated by a candidate who would rather talk about global warming than gay marriage, conservatives might simply stay home...
...and Democracy Corps’s +12 for Democrats...
...As NBC News political director Chuck Todd pointed out last week, many of those who are now calling themselves independents are likely to be conservatives disappointed with the Republican party...
...Shortly after that he spent a week on a trip informally dubbed the “Places Republicans Don’t Go” tour...
...McCain’s campaign isn’t worried...
...And that fact probably helps explain why the L.A...
...The party identification in this poll, argued McCain’s pollsters, “is greatly out of line with what most other surveys are reporting...
...It’s good to see yourself running, for us to be, most polls show us frankly two, three, four points down,” said McCain...
...The conventional wisdom, adopted and internalized by many on the McCain campaign, is that McCain must move to the center to appeal to independents...
...By running as a centrist, McCain risks further alienating conservatives, the voters most responsible for getting George W. Bush elected twice...
...CBS News/New York Times’s +14 for Democrats...
...They’re right...
...Ninety-one percent of those who identifi ed themselves as Obama supporters say they are “enthusiastic” about their candidate...
...One possibility: nowhere...
...Although Democrats hold a strong advantage in party identifi - cation, more people consider themselves conservatives than liberals...
...McCain’s pollsters point to the fi ndings of other surveys on party identifi cation...
...In late June, McCain met with a group of profamily conservatives in Ohio...
...Data from that same Washington Post/ABC News poll support this claim...
...But it is a strategy that carries considerable risks...
...He has to motivate conservatives to support him (financially now and at the polls in November), and he has to woo independent voters away from a charismatic liberal...
...One could reasonably argue that the strategy is working...
...One finding in particular caught their attention...
...He has launched radio ads explicitly targeting Hispanics and last month held secret meetings with Hispanic and gay leaders...
...Times, 22 percent of those surveyed identified themselves as Republicans, 39 percent as Democrats, and 27 percent as independents...
...The pollsters for John McCain’s campaign sent out a memo challenging the findings of a poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg...
...but only 17 percent say they are “very enthusiastic...
...So winning support from independents and conservatives may, in many cases, be the same thing...
...So that’s largely what he’s done...
...Not long afterwards, he traveled to Washington and Oregon talking about global warming...
...Among the numbers the McCain campaign highlighted: AP/Ipsos’s +14 for Democrats...
...Not bad...
...asks one McCain adviser, expressing a sentiment I’ve heard from several others...
...And I’d like to give you a little straight talk...
...Although the L.A...
...The average advantage for Democrats in the ten surveys the McCain campaign cited was 9.3 points...
...To that end, McCain might want to make this an issues election and run as a conservative, emphasizing issues—the war on terror, spending and government waste, tax reform, racial preferences, and gay marriage among them—on which large segments of independents and conservatives agree...
...And voters will still prefer a center-right candidate to a liberal one...
...Times/ Bloomberg poll has Barack Obama beating John McCain by 15 points (in a fi eld including Nader and Barr)—a much larger margin than most other respected polls...
...That’s good for this stage of the game, particularly considering the headwind we have on our economy...
...Seventy-three percent of self-identifi ed McCain supporters say they are “enthusiastic” about his candidacy...
...More ominous, while almost half of the liberals surveyed are enthusiastic about Obama, only 13 percent of conservatives are enthusiastic about McCain...
...Times/Bloomberg poll shows a larger gap between Democrats and Republicans than all others—+17 for Democrats—the news for Republicans is uniformly bad...
...The survey found that 38 percent of those polled thought of themselves as Democrats, 24 percent as Republicans, and 34 percent as independents...
...The Gallup daily tracking poll, the McCain campaign eagerly points out, has McCain down just 3 points...
...That they would do this suggests just how damaged the Republican party brand is heading into the 2008 general election...
...We are still a center-right country,” says Winston...
...Obama and the Republican party 19 points down from the Democrats...
...The Washington Post reported that conservative turnout “soared” in 2004, climbing above the impressive level that the Bush campaign reached in 2000...
...Twice in recent weeks, McCain has participated in virtual town halls targeting disaffected Democrats and moderates...
...Republican pollster David Winston believes that McCain can close this enthusiasm gap by campaigning on issues where there are sharp differences between the candidates...
...BY STEPHEN F. HAYES About the time political reporters were sitting down to lunch on June 24, BlackBerries all over Washington buzzed with an unusual email...
...And the previous week, he took a break from talking energy to pound Obama for his embrace of the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision—a decision voters opposed 5 to 1. There is another reason to do this...
...Hundreds of polls are released during a typical campaign without such a public objection...
...McCain, it seems, has to do two things at once to win...
...There was a poll last week that showed me three points down from Sen...
...This lack of enthusiasm for McCain among conservatives was evident in the Washington Post/ABC News poll taken in mid-June...
...Only 21 percent of those polled thought of themselves as liberals, while 33 percent saw themselves as conservatives and 43 percent as moderates...
...Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Immediately after McCain became the de facto nominee, he toured the country touting his biography...
...54 percent say they are “very enthusiastic...
...So Republicans are clearly at a signifi cant disadvantage...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 41
