Counting On Wal-Mart Women

Eleanor Clift

Despite his pollster's predictions, that group isn't likely to save McCain. So the question becomes, how can the GOP save itself?

Just about every poll shows Barack Obama ahead in key battleground states, yet an internal McCain campaign memo, conveniently leaked to the media, calls the race "functionally even." The memo's author, highly regarded pollster Bill McInturff, argues that McCain's salvation will be "Wal-Mart women" without a college degree making below $60,000 a year. These are the voters the politicians overlook and who have found their voice in Sarah Palin and their gender counterpart in Joe the Plumber—or so the theory goes.

An election night surprise is always possible, but the last time the so-called Wal-Mart women were for McCain was during the Palin mania in early September. Since then, the support for Barack Obama among these voters has grown into a twenty-point gap in Obama's favor. Reading McInturff's memo online, Sam Popkin, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego and author of "The Reasoning Voter," concludes that the beleaguered McCain pollster "must be smoking something."

Popkin polls for The Economist magazine, and McInturff's assertions didn't sound right to him. So he ploughed through the last five months of polling he did for The Economist in search of the Wal-Mart women trend. "I'm looking at the graph," he told me as he scrolled down to find the data. In early September, Wal-Mart women were essentially split, with Obama ahead by three or four points. By the time of the first debate, Obama had a 15-point lead, reflecting the diminishing returns of the Palin pick for McCain along with the increasing saliency of the economy as an issue. McInturff evidently chose his words carefully, introducing a phrase open to interpretation. "Functionally even—I don't know what that means," says Popkin. "Is it the same as functionally illiterate? It doesn't reflect in any way, shape or form the data I'm looking at."

Popkin sympathizes with his fellow pollster and the pressure he's under. "At this point, in the last week of a campaign, you have to excuse whatever anybody says," Popkin told NEWSEEK. "He can't say 'it's over,' or Republicans will never talk to him again." You don't have to be a cynic to wonder if the McInturff memo is more of an effort to rally the troops in the face of depressing poll numbers than it is serious scholarship. In 1980, when pollster Pat Caddell told President Carter, before a single vote had been cast, that he would lose by a big margin to Ronald Reagan, a Grade-B movie actor, Carter was so humiliated he just wanted to get the whole thing over with. On Election Day, he rushed to concede before the polls had closed on the West Coast, costing Democrats seats in the House and Senate as morale plummeted and voters stayed home, assuming the election was over.

Whatever McCain's fate on Election Day, Republicans need to get out their vote to salvage what they can in congressional and state races. After the conventions, it looked for a time as though McCain might overcome the historical odds against him as the standard-bearer for a party and a president that had lost credibility with voters. Democrats worried about the recriminations in their party if Obama lost. If the Democrats couldn't win the White House in this climate, when could they? Imagine the chorus of "I told you so" coming from the Hillary camp. The more likely scenario now is the implosion of the Republican Party, especially if it's an Obama blowout. Many Republicans have started pointing fingers early. "Fire the whole campaign," conservative columnist Bill Kristol asserted weeks ago.

What's shaping up is not comparable to '92, the last time a Democrat won the White House. "It's much more serious and devastating to Republicans," says Stan Greenberg, who was Bill Clinton's pollster. Democrats lost seats in '92; Clinton had no coattails. Obama may enter the White House with close to a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a doubling of the Democratic margin in the House. This is a watershed election. Typically, every four years, somebody wins, somebody loses, and life goes on. But Obama represents generational change that has huge political repercussions. He wins 63 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 29. For the Republicans, "It's not just a lost election, it's a lost generation," says Greenberg.

Who will they blame for this turn of events? "Overwhelmingly, it's you guys," Greenburg told reporters at a Washington breakfast last week. Republicans are convinced that media bias in favor of Obama tipped the election in his favor, and that coverage of Sarah Palin has been unfairly harsh, conveying sexism as well as anti-conservative bias. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, always a GOP crowd pleaser, calls the mainstream media "Pravda." Blaming the press may feel good. But it won't solve the problem of a party that has lost its way.

© 2008