Note: I meant to include this disclaimer originally, but I failed to do so. This post is a working version of a more serious and thorough paper I’m writing, but I wanted to outline my reasoning here. Although it is unclear in the original article, I don’t purport to have any insider information on what the McCain camp is or is not doing at this point. This is simply a theory to explain its behavior. It is based on the assumption that the campaign is a rational actor, in the formal sense. In that way, it is perhaps better to understand the post as what the campaign’s motivating principles should have been–not necessarily what they were.
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Update: Here’s a draft of a flow chart I made to illustrate what I’m talking about. Again, both the chart and the narrative are tentative drafts at this point:
Flow chart Outlining the decision-making process
The title of this post is obviously hyperbolic, but I don’t think that it is entirely inaccurate. John McCain certainly wants to be the next president, but so do Ralph Nader, Bob Barr, and the huppet (human-muppet) Alan Keyes. But these three men hold no illusions that they will be the next president, and they conduct themselves accordingly. While McCain is by no means a third-party candidate, and a Republican victory is certainly within the realm of possibility, I believe that the later stages of his campaign indicate that he has accepted that he is a long-shot, and that, like a third-party candidate, other considerations have begun to enter into his decision-making.
Again, I very much want to emphasize that this election has yet to occur, and that anything is possible. While I believe that an Obama victory is certainly the most likely outcome, I know that it is by no means a certainty. And I know that this thought must still be in the minds of the McCain campaign staff, but at some point, they probably recognize that you gotta know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em.
In the selection of Sarah Palin, persistent attacks which followed the financial collapse, the campaign’s behavior may indicate a decision to consolidate its strength, win the battles it could, and pray that some unforseen events would hand it the White House.
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It seems pretty clear that McCain didn’t want to pick Palin. He personally wanted to pick Joe Lieberman to be his running mate. Some of his campaign staff apparently wanted Mitt Romney. Either pick would have been absolutely disastrous for the GOP, accepting that McCain was in a very tough strategic position. According to an article in the latest New Yorker, McCain was told by aides, “[i]f you pick anyone else you will lose. If you pick Palin, you may win”.
At the time of the selection, I had agreed, writing:
“It’s a gamble.. almost a Hail Mary, which suggests to me that the McCain campaign doesn’t see the narrowing national polls as a great sign. My guess is that the campaign agrees with Plouffe’s assessment of the race and knows it has its work cut out for it. “
I believe that time has shown that this is partially true, but it misses the bigger picture. McCain didn’t only pick Sarah Palin because he thought it was his only shot at turning the election around, he picked her because he recognized that there may not have been anything he could do to turn it around.
Being the nominee of a party in shambles, facing a terribly unfriendly electoral map, and a possibly insurmountable fundraising deficit, and to say nothing of the legacy of the W. administration, McCain didn’t really have a choice other than the photogenic, female, popular Alaska governor.
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Earlier, I suggested that the move was made in ‘desperation’, but I wonder if that isn’t the correct word. I do not mean to imply that it was a foolhardy or (politically) reckless decision. Rather, it was the best strategic choice.
Palin could help McCain take the White House in a way that Romney or Lieberman likely could not. She would dominate the media coverage and just might be likeable enough to eke out victory in Florida, Ohio and other key swing states. But more importantly, the selection of Palin would help the GOP nationally in ways that no one else possibly could. She could bring grassroots (ie, talk-radio afficianado) enthusiasm to a campaign which was fighting a losing battle to appeal to the middle in a Democratic year.
That grassroots support was unlikely to sway the election. For one, the evangelical/religious right/hardcore conservative movement in this country is much smaller and unevenly geographically distributed than most realize. Social conservatives-the apparent target audience in the final months of the McCain campaign-are most influential in states that are already red to begin with.
The culture wars are apparently salient to certain constituiencies in 2008. But the geographic distribution of those constituencies means that appealing directly to them this late in the season provides little benefit in terms of electoral college returns.
Getting white evangelicals to the polls will certainly help the GOP’s popular vote total, but much of that will come from states like Bible belt and rural Western states. In other words, states that McCain was almost certainly going to win before the Palin selection.
It seems unlikely that focusing on that group would provide anywhere near enough turnaround in other states that McCain would need to win in order to reach 270 electoral votes. For every conservative voter in swing states that responded positively to these appeals, there would certainly be others across the map who would feel alienated and annoyed by the same old tactics.
In a year in which the electoral map was initially favoring the Democrats, the GOP candidate should have been doing everything in his power to broaden his appeal beyond the base. With the selection of Palin, McCain gave himself the opportunity to do the exact opposite. This could be a simple case of inept politics, but I doubt that a very successful (four term) Senator would lack such basic political instincts.
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Palin’s popularity with the conservative rank-and-file has been astounding. For a campaign that had trouble getting 1,000 people to its rallies, she has been something of a godsend. But that isn’t because she can single-handedly deliver the White House to the Republicans.
What she can do is almost as important. That enthusiasm from the base will, of course, translate into more votes for McCain. Many of these are effectively non-votes, however, because they will be cast in solidly red states. States like Mississippi, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Tennssee.
None of those states were considered to be ‘in-play’ when Palin was selected (North Carolina and Georgia may be marginally attainable for Obama now). But they are crucially important for the GOP this year, because each of the aforementioned states features a Senate race in which a Republican incumbent seat could be lost to the Democrats.
There is no doubt that the 111th Congress will be majority-Democratic. Additionally, the GOP could conceivably lose five seats in blue states this go-around. The worst-case scenario for Republicans is a net loss of 13 seats. Being a minority Congressional party with no filibuster powers for at least two years is the worst strategic position for an American political party (SEE: Democrats, 2001-2007).
But it gets worse for the GOP. The 112th Congress looks to be another brutal one for Republicans. In 2010, the GOP will have more incumbent seats up for reelection than the Democrats, and, from a strategic perspective, it should assume that it will be nearly impossible to regain a Senate majority until 2012.
With Palin on the ticket, the chances of holding red state Senate seats ought to drop precipitously due to higher conservative turnout rates.
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The economic crisis was very, very bad news for the McCain campaign. A candidate whose central narrative centered on his purported expertise in foreign policy would have to depend on an electoral cycle long on international relations and short on domestic issues.
When financial institutions started falling like dominoes, and the imaginary wealth of the later Bush years was revealed to be exactly that, McCain’s earlier comments that he didn’t understand economics were sure to (fairly or not) have a prominent place in the remaining months.
After the puzzling publicity stunt to ’suspend’ his campaign, the McCain team responded forcefully and repeatedly with negative campaigning. It was all Bill Ayers, all the time.
It would be easy to write off this tactic as a desperate move to do something–anything–to swing the tide of the campaign were it not for the persistence of the message and the attacks long after it was apparent that they were harming McCain more than Obama nationally.
For all of his campaign’s missteps, McCain and his political advisors are skilled professionals at what they do. They may have simply been out of touch with the country’s political pulse, and legitmately believed that the Obama-as-Terrorist arguments would scare more people than they actually did, but the evidence suggests otherwise. It suggests that the final weeks and months of the McCain campaign were a carefully orchestrated and targeted campaign to make the best of a bad situation.
Were the campaign only about the presidency, a losing McCain-Lieberman ticket would be no better than a losing McCain-Palin ticket. But elections aren’t that simple, and in a down year, a centrist loser is far worse than an ideological one.
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