McCain’s Path to Victory Keeps Narrowing

The Obama campaign cannot afford to get complacent, because polls can be wrong, but the New York Observer does a good job of laying out the uphill task for McCain, as it stands today:

Just consider the electoral map. Four years ago, George W. Bush won re-election with 286 electoral votes, meaning he had almost no margin for error. So to win this year, Mr. McCain would need to either hold on to all of the states that Mr. Bush won or to compensate for the loss of a few Bush states by picking off a Democratic state or two.

This is easier said than done. By any reasonable standard, Mr. McCain has fallen hopelessly behind in Iowa, a Bush state, where polls consistently give Mr. Obama double-digit leads. And he now routinely trails by nearly ten points in polls in Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico, Bush states all. As with national polls, there is absolutely no evidence in any of these states of movement toward Mr. McCain; if anything, the trend is against him – especially in Virginia, where the race was legitimately even a month ago.

Together, these states account for 34 electoral votes. If Mr. McCain can’t manufacture miracles in at least three of them over the last two weeks of the campaign, he won’t even have a theoretical chance of reaching 270 electoral votes with just Bush states.

And this isn’t even taking into consideration the countless Bush states in which Mr. McCain is at least competitive. North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, Indiana, West Virginia, Georgia, and North Dakota: To believe that Mr. McCain will yet win the White House is to believe that he will win every single one of these states, even though he now trails in many of them.

Then there are the blue states. Of all the states that John Kerry won in 2004, New Hampshire is the closest – Mr. Obama leads by seven points, on average – but it’s only worth four electoral votes, and anyway the trend in the Granite State is working against Mr. McCain. Where else? Pennsylvania? Mr. Obama leads by 16 points there, on average. In Minnesota, his lead is eight. After that, there really aren’t any blue state targets for Mr. McCain, who recently stopped throwing money into Michigan, Wisconsin and Maine.

And combining those challenges with the fact that the news cycle today will be dominated with discussion of the $150,000 the RNC spent on Sarah Palin’s hair, wardrobe and make-up…McCain’s in deep, deep trouble. Nobody can say this campaign is over before election day, but it certainly appears that without a significant event to change the dynamic, we will have a new president early in the evening on November 4th.

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