John McCain's New Chant: Your Sky Is Falling

"When they're spending money in Arizona and Montana, what else do you need to know?" asked pollster Peter Hart yesterday about the McCain campaign's (latest) absurdity: that the race is tightening, it's now within reach.

Hart answered what he asked on MSNBC's "Race for the White House" (which reminds me: What are they going to call that show after next week? -- "Race for H.R. 1136, a Bill to Amend H.R. 1135"?) in response to a Republican colleague's dutiful regurgitation of the McCain absurdity. But Hart has an immense educational task ahead of him, because the media -- in an effort to keep suspense alive and ratings high -- have joined the "tightening" chorus with full-throated enthusiasm.

For once, however, I'm delighted with the media's profitable sniveling, because these sudden speculations about Barack Obama's impending doom should now propel every imbecile who was about to stay home Tuesday to instead vote in return-fire panic -- the thought that in-the-bag elections are only in the bag when the winning side bothers to vote, apparently having never occurred to said imbecile.

In the meantime, there's a new circus in town to keep us amused. What McCain and his pollsters are publicly and specifically touting -- what, that is, they have ballyhooed to the media as their last-minute salvation -- is a wave of still-undecided voters going their way (as opposed to an even more unbelievable mass defection from soft-Obama supporters). That's their story, and they are, as they say, sticking to it.

Yet the overall picture persists in looking insurmountably grim; and at any rate the historical behavior of undecided voters fails to lend much credibility to their argument.

As the Politico reported yesterday, Pew Research Center's "recent studies found that 8 percent of the 2008 electorate remained undecided" -- another public poll has the number at 6, and this morning's NYT/CBS News poll has it at an even paltrier 4 -- "similar to its findings among registered voters in the last week of the 2004 election."

And what did Pew's historical records -- those beyond 2004 -- indicate? That "undecided voters are unlikely to break decisively for either candidate and dramatically alter Tuesday’s race."

Indeed, as the NYT says of its still-undecided 4 percent group: "when they were pressed to say whom they leaned toward, the shape of the race remained essentially the same." Pew's "internal analysis" of its current polling concurred: "undecided voters [are] likely to split about equally between McCain and Obama on Election Day."

"There is likely no hidden life raft in the undecided vote for John McCain," said Pew's director, Andy Kohut. Or, just to modify and extend the metaphor, the tide of the undecided vote will lift both boats, but rescue neither. One doesn't need rescuing, and the other's a goner.

But here's something else to comfortably ponder. Let's say we go ahead and grant the McCain camp some statistically significant, last-minute and favorable imbalance among that stupendously fickle 8 percent or 6 percent or 4 percent of the electorate.

It changes nothing.

This morning's RealClearPolitics.com average still shows Obama with an extraordinary 169 point spread (311 to 142) in the electoral count, with 85 in the toss-up category. As suggested, go ahead -- give every one of those toss ups to McCain. That still doesn’t budge the 311, nor does anything between it and 270 budge an Obama victory.

Or look at it from yet another angle -- from the vista of those Bush-won battleground states that McCain absolutely needs to retain to have any hope at all. With four days to go it's Ohio, Obama by 5.8; Colorado, Obama by 6.5; Virginia, Obama by 6.5; Nevada, Obama by 7.0; New Mexico, Obama by 7.3.

And then there are those battlegrounds within the margin of error, including Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Indiana and Montana. It is of course highly doubtful that Obama will win all of these, and it's not unreasonable to expect that he won't win all of the previous batch, either. The point, however, is that Obama doesn't need to win all of them to mount 270.

McCain does. And that's the insurmountability of it all -- the same as Hillary Clinton's was: stubborn arithmetic.

But just to reiterate; it's a delight that the media are echoing the McCain camp's impossible dream, since the nervous fallout should have the effect of increasing Democratic turnout -- the last necessary nail in the GOP's rather commodious coffin.