Looking at the Gallup Daily Tracking Polls every day, as some of us do, we see two sets of numbers — Clinton vs. Obama among Dems, and McCain vs. both Dems among all voters. The prior is volatile and unpredictable; the latter is so steady, it’s hardly worth watching.
Take a look at today’s report, for example. Over the last few weeks, Obama’s lead was huge, then small, then gone, then big again — but all the while, in a general election match-up, he and McCain are just about tied at 45% each. The same goes for a match-up pitting Clinton and McCain. No matter what’s going on in the news, or what the controversy of the day is, these two polls just don’t budge; the numbers remain the same.
So, is this encouraging or discouraging? I posed the question last week, noting that there’s two entirely opposite but completely reasonable interpretations here. One is that Dems are lucky to still be tied with McCain, given that he’s had it easy while Clinton and Obama have been tearing each other to shreds. The other is that Dems should be crushing McCain, given that he’s running on a Bush-like platform, and Americans are thoroughly unhappy with the status quo.
Jonathan Cohn argues today that McCain’s 45% standing against Obama or Hillary “represents a ceiling of his support.”
After all, barring some outside shock to the political system, there is no reason to think McCain’s numbers will go up. People already have overwhelmingly positive feelings about him–stronger than about either of the Democratic candidates. They see him as a likeable, principled war hero whom they trust on national security. Very few realize that he has supported privatizing Social Security, that he opposes universal health insurance, that he supports free trade without qualification, and so on. Once the voters learn these things, at least some of them are likely to abandon him.
If anything, McCain has the look of an Internet stock circa 1999: Great numbers, lousy fundamentals.
That’s relatively persuasive, but it’s still not a good reason to let the Democratic race continue.
Kevin agrees with Jon, and takes the argument a little further.
…McCain simply isn’t as strong a candidate as people seem to think he is. Factors working against him include Bush fatigue, a declining economy, his age, his need to pander heavily to the Christian right, his hawkishness in a year when the public isn’t feeling very hawkish, his history of flip flopping for transparently political reasons, and a portfolio of extremely unpopular positions (like privatizing Social Security) that Democrats can make a lot of hay with in the fall. What’s more — and go ahead, call me an optimist — I suspect that at some point there’s going to be a press backlash against McCain. His media image is a bubble, sustained by a sort of childlike faith, and once that faith starts to wobble — something that may already have started — the bubble is likely to pop. Before long, I suspect that a lot of reporters are going to start recognizing his faux openness as more faux than open.
Of course, this all assumes that Hillary Clinton decides not to be completely suicidal and take down the party in a huge ball of flames. But I don’t think she will. Even the Clintons have to bow to reality eventually.
I’d take issue with Kevin’s optimism over the media — I’ve been waiting for nine years for reporters to consider a backlash against McCain, and it’s never happened — but the rest of the analysis is sound. McCain, as a candidate, isn’t especially scary at all. He’s clumsy, unprincipled, arrogant, often belligerent, and usually confused. He was the best Republican candidate in the GOP field, but it was an awfully weak field.
But taking all of this into consideration, that’s all the more incentive to end the Democratic race and get the general election started. Like, now. Dems have a very powerful case to make against McCain, but they can’t make it while the party is divided in half, and they’re waiting until late August for a nominee.
McCain has high favorability ratings, nearly universal name ID, and the enduring love of every major news outlet in the country. The sooner Dems start making their case against McCain — which really isn’t that tough to make — Dems can position themselves for an incredibly successful, possibly even historic, year — at the top of the ballot on down.
The chances of this happening in a truncated, eight-week general election campaign, with a divided Democratic Party and a Republican nominee that will have a five-month head start, are considerably less. Cohn argues that it can come together for Dems anyway, so the party can just be patient and let all of this play out.
I’m not nearly as optimistic.