The final national polls are in. Obama is winning every single one of them by margins of between five and 13 points.
McCain trails Obama in every recent poll in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Virginia, Colorado, Ohio, and Florida. To win, he likely needs to win not one but all of those states. While Nate Silver sees “a hair’s worth of tightening” on the state level, he pegs the odds of Obama winning at 96.3%.
On ABC’s This Week, the panel made these predictions:
Mark Halperin, Time Magazine:
Electoral Vote — 349 ObamaMatthew Dowd, former Republican strategist:
Electoral Vote — 338 plus ObamaGeorge Will, ABC News contributor:
Electoral Vote — 378 Obama
Donna Brazile, former Democratic strategist:
Electoral Vote — Obama 343George Stephanopoulos:
Electoral Vote — 353 Obama
In the face of such overwhelmingly bad news, the McCain campaign has recently been touting its internal polls which, it claims, show “significant movement” in the battleground states:
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McInturff, the campaign’s chief pollster, made a case for the viability of the campaign in a memo to the strategy team, which was released to the media late Tuesday. The campaign has seen the race between McCain and Barack Obama move “significantly over the past week,” McInturff said. “All signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday.”
McCain campaign manager Rick Davis spent all weekend citing the campaign’s internals:
Iowa’s a good example. Public polling had it at 12 points. Our own data now has us dead even in the state of Iowa. And we understand Barack Obama probably has very similar polling. He’s now on his way back to Iowa as one of his last campaign stops.
The McCain campaign hasn’t actually released any of the data backing up its claim that it sees significant movement in its internal polls, of course. (I haven’t seen an interview in which a reporter follows up on the claim with a request to review that data, either, but that’s another topic.)
If what the McCain camp says is true, it would be a massive momentum-builder. Demoralized volunteers and supporters would enthusiastically rally — money would come in and Republican voters would flock to the polls. Yet McCain refuses to release the polls which show a dramatic tightening not reflected in any public poll. A more cynical observer might suggest that the McCain campaign isn’t being entirely truthful and is instead just trying prevent its supporters from not showing up at all tomorrow.
Here are some campaigns which, unlike the McCain juggernaut, may not have been entirely truthful about what their late October or early November internal polls showed:
1988: While refusing to disclose details of internal polls, John Sasso, vice chairman of the Dukakis campaign, asserted today that Mr. Dukakis was closing Vice President Bush’s lead in Ohio, California and Texas.
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1992: [George H.W. Bush's] campaign sent [Michigan Governor John Engler] into the press briefing room to proclaim that the Republicans had delved into internal and public polls showing that Mr. Perot was eating into Gov. Bill Clinton’s lead and found that, instead, Mr. Bush was “closing” on the Democratic Presidential nominee.
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1996: Republicans said internal polls show the many Ohio appearances by the Dole-Kemp ticket paying dividends – the race is tightening, they said. Independent statewide polls, however, have shown former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole consistently trailing President Clinton by at least 8 percentage points.
And here’s a bonus quote from H.W. Bush supporter John Engler in 1992:
The Republican Governor was immediately asked why his remarks were any different from Democratic assertions of a last-minute “surge” for Gov. Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. “This is real,” Mr. Engler snapped. “His wasn’t.”
We’ll see tomorrow.
Update:
McCain to sweep New Jersey, Michigan — maybe even California, say PUMA geniuses:
