Has John McCain fallen too far behind, too late in the presidential campaign, to overtake Barack Obama? That is the question facing strategists in both parties three weeks before Election Day. History suggests that the answer is probably so.Obama has already made history as the first African-American to become a major-party nominee for president. But his breakthrough represents a wild card that could yield election returns at odds with poll results. Beyond that, McCain’s hopes rest on capturing the support of undecided voters, as well as shaking loose some voters who support his Democratic rival.No one, including Obama’s advisers, says such a turnaround in McCain’s favor is impossible. But the magnitude of McCain’s task may leave him depending on a misstep by Obama or a national security crisis rather than on what he can achieve through speeches, advertising or a winning performance in the final debate on Wednesday. “At this point,” said Matthew Dowd, a strategist for George W Bush in 2000 and 2004, “the campaign is totally out of John McCain’s hands.”In the latest Gallup tracking poll, Obama leads McCain 50 per cent to 43 per cent among registered voters. McCain’s deficit has remained seven percentage points or more for most of the last two weeks.Since Gallup began presidential polling in 1936, only one candidate has overcome a deficit that large, and this late, to win the White House: Ronald Reagan, who trailed President Jimmy Carter 47 percent to 39 percent in a survey completed on October 26, 1980.Yet Carter, like McCain today, represented the party holding the White House in bad times. After Reagan successfully presented himself as an alternative to Carter in their lone debate, held on the late date of October 28, he surged ahead. After two debates, Obama holds a lead that is approaching Reagan’s eventual margin of victory.In 1968, Vice President Hubert H Humphrey all but erased a 12-point early-October deficit before losing narrowly to Richard M Nixon. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore wiped out a seven-point deficit in the final 10 days of the election, winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College to Bush.But since polling began, the pattern is that swings in opinion get smaller as Election Day approaches and voters gather more information. As American politics have grown more polarized, the opportunity for large swings has become smaller still. Four years ago, John Kerry trailed Bush slightly in the homestretch. A near-even split on Election Day among the few remaining undecided voters sealed Kerry’s defeat.“There appears to be more flex in the current electorate than in 2004, but less than in 2000,” said Richard Johnston, research director of the National Annenberg Election Survey, at the University of Pennsylvania. McCain’s strategists acknowledge that for a realistic chance to win the election through battleground states, McCain must reduce Obama’s advantage in the national popular vote to no more than three or four percentage points. In 2000, Bush finished less than one percentage point behind Gore in the popular vote.Since 1948, front-running candidates have typically preserved three-fourths of their October leads, said Larry M Bartels, a political scientist at Princeton. Applying statistical theory to current polls, he pegged Obama’s chance of winning the popular vote at “a little over 90 per cent.”Bartels noted three factors that might skew the results. Two of them, a potential surge in voter turnout and the tendency of undecided voters to punish the party holding the White House during an economic downturn, appear to favor Obama. The third, racial resistance among white voters, favors McCain.
