Taking the Measure of an Obama Victory

One can't. Or at least this one can't. So the above-advertised link sent me scurrying to the Financial Times, where columnist Clive Crook's officially titled "One simple way to predict a victor" awaited me. It was worth the electronic journey, which on my aging computer, I can assure you, is never one taken at optimal cyber speed.

But at any rate, the route to Crook's scorching conclusion with respect to McCain's electoral fate began with this:

One cannot help but be struck by the current disconnection in US presidential politics between, on one hand, the excitement and enthusiasm that attend Barack Obama’s candidacy and, on the other, the tightness of the race....

Look at the polls. A recent Gallup reading says that Mr Obama’s slender lead has narrowed; last week Rasmussen’s tracking poll called the race a tie. State-by-state polling, filtered through the electoral college arithmetic, gives Mr McCain a real shot at victory.

Granted, Crook's set-up is a slightly skewed way of looking at the whole picture. What he says about these particular polls is, of course, correct, and it's also true that McCain's number crunchers still see, and not entirely unreasonably, a rather traditional South-West-Rustbelt path to the White House.

On the other hand, based on an averaging of all the various state-by-state polls Obama is up, for instance, in Ohio, he's up in Virginia, up in Michigan and up in Colorado; not by retiring or even comfortable margins, but up is better than down. What's more, in the past week RealClearPolitics' electoral college count for Obama, after eliminating the 'toss-up' category, has moved from 304 to 322.

Nevertheless, Crook's point is well taken. It has been and remains something of a puzzlement that any poll could find this contest even marginally close, let alone nail-bitingly contestable. Obama has been thundering along almost flawlessly for months, while McCain ... well, poor John McCain; though veteran master of the universe he is, he's still struggling with elementary world geography. Yet Gallup finds them statistically tied?

"How does one make sense of this?" asks Crook. The answer he provides is to dismiss the polls as "worthless" at this point and look instead to political scientist Alan Abramowitz's "electoral barometer," which, as Crook describes it, is a "laughably simple metric" that "weighs together the approval rating of the incumbent president, the economy’s economic growth rate and whether the president’s party has controlled the White House for two terms (the 'time for a change' factor)."

As Crook reminds us, laughably simple the metric may be, but it has "correctly forecast the winner of the popular vote in 14 out of 15 postwar presidential elections." (I should add that Abramowitz nearly had that one outlier nailed as well. The election he miscalled was that of 1968, yet, according to pollsters, Hubert Humphrey's momentum was such that had the election been held only one or two weeks later, he would have won.)

But back to the future, which, as Crook reports, is colored by this Abramowitzian finding: This election cycle's barometer "gives the Republican candidate a score ... as bad as it gets: second only to Mr Carter’s in the annals of doomed postwar candidacies."

In other words, writes Crook, the barometer says Mr. Obama is going to waltz to victory.

The one unquantifiable and possible inhibitor to an Obama victory, however, is the familiar one of race, which Abramowitz examined as best he could nearly three months ago in a Washington Post op-ed.

Overtly racist beliefs are much less prevalent among white Americans of all classes today. But a more subtle form of prejudice, which social scientists sometimes call symbolic racism, is still out there -- especially among working-class whites. Symbolic racism means believing that African American poverty and other problems are largely the result of lack of ambition and effort, rather than white racism and discrimination. Who holds symbolically racist beliefs [that could spill over into the election]?

The answer to that was self-evident. But did this imply that McCain is not, in fact, toast? Not necessarily, yet Abramowitz was socially scientifically vague, noting merely that this abominable economy and resentment toward the GOP could overshadow -- overcome -- racial prejudice. It would be methodologically reassuring if the strength of such sociological currents could be measured, but they can't.

Still, we have Abramowitz's bang-up barometer and his bigger big picture that can indeed be quantified -- the one portraying Obama's "waltz to victory."