Counting On Wal-Mart Women
Despite his pollster's predictions, that group isn't likely to save McCain. So the question becomes, how can the GOP save itself?
Eleanor Clift
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Just about every poll shows Barack Obama ahead in key battleground states, yet an internal McCain campaign memo, conveniently leaked to the media, calls the race "functionally even." The memo's author, highly regarded pollster Bill McInturff, argues that McCain's salvation will be "Wal-Mart women" without a college degree making below $60,000 a year. These are the voters the politicians overlook and who have found their voice in Sarah Palin and their gender counterpart in Joe the Plumber—or so the theory goes.
An election night surprise is always possible, but the last time the so-called Wal-Mart women were for McCain was during the Palin mania in early September. Since then, the support for Barack Obama among these voters has grown into a twenty-point gap in Obama's favor. Reading McInturff's memo online, Sam Popkin, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego and author of "The Reasoning Voter," concludes that the beleaguered McCain pollster "must be smoking something."
Popkin polls for The Economist magazine, and McInturff's assertions didn't sound right to him. So he ploughed through the last five months of polling he did for The Economist in search of the Wal-Mart women trend. "I'm looking at the graph," he told me as he scrolled down to find the data. In early September, Wal-Mart women were essentially split, with Obama ahead by three or four points. By the time of the first debate, Obama had a 15-point lead, reflecting the diminishing returns of the Palin pick for McCain along with the increasing saliency of the economy as an issue. McInturff evidently chose his words carefully, introducing a phrase open to interpretation. "Functionally even—I don't know what that means," says Popkin. "Is it the same as functionally illiterate? It doesn't reflect in any way, shape or form the data I'm looking at."
(More here.)
Eleanor Clift
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Just about every poll shows Barack Obama ahead in key battleground states, yet an internal McCain campaign memo, conveniently leaked to the media, calls the race "functionally even." The memo's author, highly regarded pollster Bill McInturff, argues that McCain's salvation will be "Wal-Mart women" without a college degree making below $60,000 a year. These are the voters the politicians overlook and who have found their voice in Sarah Palin and their gender counterpart in Joe the Plumber—or so the theory goes.
An election night surprise is always possible, but the last time the so-called Wal-Mart women were for McCain was during the Palin mania in early September. Since then, the support for Barack Obama among these voters has grown into a twenty-point gap in Obama's favor. Reading McInturff's memo online, Sam Popkin, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego and author of "The Reasoning Voter," concludes that the beleaguered McCain pollster "must be smoking something."
Popkin polls for The Economist magazine, and McInturff's assertions didn't sound right to him. So he ploughed through the last five months of polling he did for The Economist in search of the Wal-Mart women trend. "I'm looking at the graph," he told me as he scrolled down to find the data. In early September, Wal-Mart women were essentially split, with Obama ahead by three or four points. By the time of the first debate, Obama had a 15-point lead, reflecting the diminishing returns of the Palin pick for McCain along with the increasing saliency of the economy as an issue. McInturff evidently chose his words carefully, introducing a phrase open to interpretation. "Functionally even—I don't know what that means," says Popkin. "Is it the same as functionally illiterate? It doesn't reflect in any way, shape or form the data I'm looking at."
(More here.)
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