*Breaking* Wisconsin in Play, McCain Shores Up Base
By Bud White on September 25, 2008 at 5:45 AM in Barack Obama, Current Affairs, McCain/Palin 2008, Michigan, Middle America, Minnesota, Montana, Pennsylvania
According to this report, celebrity candidate Barack Obama had 4,000 fewer people in attendance than McCain-Palin at an event in Wisconsin:
GREEN BAY, Wis. — Hoping to shore up support in his suddenly undependable backyard, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama flew here Monday to talk about how he’d handle economic crises as president.
Recent polls have shown that Wisconsin — once pretty solidly in Obama’s column — is now a statistical dead heat between Obama and Republican John McCain.
“You all know that you hold this election in your hands,” Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat who said he worked on ethics legislation with Obama, told a crowd of about 6,000 cheering Obama fans in the arena next to Lambeau Field. “We just barely won this state for Al Gore in 2000 and we just barely won this state for John Kerry in 2004.”
While it’s true that Obama has had an uptick in national polls over the last week, he is also on the defensive in more blue states. John McCain is locking down states like Ohio and Florida, and is now expanding the map into Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. Obama, it appears, has a small advantage in New Mexico and Colorado.
National Public Radio reports that the battleground states are becoming fewer:
The number of battleground states has shrunk — from 19 to 14 — as Alaska, Georgia, North Dakota and Montana returned to their Republican roots.
In August, Obama led in the 14 states by 3 points. Now McCain leads in those states by 2, and the underlying political landscape has shifted a bit as well.
If national polls swing back to McCain, and there’s no reason to think they won’t, then we should expect McCain to take a small lead in Minnesota, Wisconsin and, perhaps, Pennsylvania.
Kerry beat Bush in Wisconsin by a razor-thin .38% or 11,384 votes of nearly 3 million cast, while Ralph Nader received just over 16,000 votes. The Nader campaign recently announced that Nader will be on the ballot in Wisconsin this year, having collected 3,500 signatures.
Although not as close as Wisconsin, two other swing states are worth watching. In 2004, Kerry beat Bush by 98,319 votes in Minnesota of almost 3 million cast, and in Pennsylvania by 144,248 votes out of 6 million cast, a 2.5% margin.
What is causing Obama such problems in swing states? NPR says it’s The Clinton Factor:
something else is holding Obama back: He still hasn’t won over enough of Hillary Clinton’s voters.
“One thing that Obama tried to do in his convention was unite the Democratic vote behind him, and it still hasn’t completely happened,” Bolger said. “Our survey found that of the voters who said they voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, 20 percent of them are still voting for John McCain.”
One Clinton voter is Louis Brandenburg, a heavy-equipment operator from Avella, Pa. He said he has made up his mind for November.
“Yeah, I guess so: Mr. Obama, I guess. I have no choice,” he said.
Even with little enthusiasm, Brandenburg — a Democrat — is sticking with his party. But plenty of his friends in southwestern Pennsylvania are very enthusiastic about Sarah Palin.
“There’s a lot of them who are going to vote for her and McCain because of the hunting issue,” he said. “I can’t understand what happened to our party; it just seems like the Republican Party is always the ones who back hunters and sportsmen, and all we get from the other one is flack about hunting and guns.”
————————————————————
Photographs of empty seats at the Obama rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin:
According to Jake Tapper of ABC News, “Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin packed the house last week in Green Bay, Wis., at the Resch Center.”
by Ronald Scott
* More novels by 
* 
(
)
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
