McCain Is Cooked

By Chris Suellentrop

Election Day is in two weeks. Or is the campaign already over? “At this point it would be difficult to see Republican losses in the Senate and House to be fewer than seven and 20 respectively,” Charlie Cook writes in his National Journal column. “A very challenging situation going into September turned into a meltdown last month, the most dire predictions for the G.O.P. early on became the most likely outcome. The metrics of this election argue strongly that this campaign is over, it’s only the memory of many an election that seemed over but wasn’t that is keeping us from closing the book mentally on this one.” Among Cook’s reasons:

First, no candidate behind this far in the national polls, this late in the campaign has come back to win. Sure, we have seen come-from-behind victories, but they didn’t come back this far this late.

Second, early voting has made comebacks harder and would tend to diminish the impact of the kind of late-breaking development that might save McCain’s candidacy. With as many as one-third of voters likely to cast their ballot before Election Day, every day more are cast and the campaign is effectively over for them. The longer Obama has this kind of lead and the more votes are cast early, the more voters are out of the pool for McCain.

Third, considering that 89 percent of all voters who identified themselves as Democrats voted for John Kerry four years ago and 93 percent of Republicans cast their ballots for George W. Bush, the switch from parity between the parties to a 10-point Democratic advantage would seem to almost seal this outcome irrespective of the candidates fielded on each side. The unprecedented surges seen in Democratic party registrations in those states that require party affiliations confirm that.

At the end of his column, Cook concludes, “As things are going now, this election would appear to be on a track to match Bill Clinton’s 1992 5.6 percent margin over President George H.W. Bush, the question is whether it gets to Bush’s 1988 7.7 percent win over Michael Dukakis or Clinton’s 8.5 percent win over Robert Dole in 1996. Maybe some cataclysmic event occurs in the next two weeks that changes the trajectory of this election, but to override these factors, it would have to be very, very big.”