June may be the cruelest month, not April, because all those voter polls really don’t tell us much about what’s going to happen in November. We’re four months out from the election, and anything - a foreign attack, a major scandal, Swift Boating - can change the playing field and equalize any advantage one candidate had over another. And yet when supporters of one candidate (in this case Barack Obama) see he’s up 6 percentage points across the country in several polls, including today’s Franklin & Marshall poll, they take that as a sign their candidate is doing well.
And he might be. There’s one thing we have to remember, though: Presidents are not elected by popular vote. Just because Obama is up over John McCain doesn’t mean he has the Electoral College locked down.
What has to be troublesome to the McCain camp is this: More than half of F&M’s 1,500 registered voters who responded said they experienced one of 11 financial hardships during the last year, hurdles like lack of health care or loss of buying power or pay cuts, and those people said they would vote for Obama by a 50-27 percent margin. Ouch. Tell me again why this isn’t a change election?
As a blow to conventional wisdom, the Iraq War came in as the No. 2 most important issue (the economy was number one), something you would think favors McCain with his military credentials and the perception of an Iraq on the turnaround in terms of violence. Yet, Obama leads among them 54-30 percent.
What raises a few eyebrows is those who consider the nation’s energy policy the most important issue, and they favor McCain 41-34 percent. That could possibly be because Obama just hasn’t spelled out in concrete detail what he would do about rising gasoline prices. McCain and the Republicans have him on the defensive, labeling him as “Dr. No” on things like drilling for oil off-shore and on the continent where it’s currently prohibited. Sure, Obama’s touted a platform of taxing oil company profits to spur alternative energy development, but are people really convinced the tax won’t be passed off by oil companies onto consumers?
The “moral and family values” voters are on the McCain bandwagon by a landslide, 70 percent to 17 percent, which makes me laugh because “moral and family values” seems so undefined. My morals aren’t necessarily your morals, and sooo there’s too much ambiguity to draw any conclusions there.
All of this can shift in a moment. Consider how Obama performed in Pennsylvania leading into the primary election on April 22. He chipped away at Clinton’s considerable lead, making the Clintonites sweat and wonder if an Obama upset in a state she should win huge would knock her out of the race. And then Obama had a slip of the tongue and uttered the most repeated word of the election (it rhymes with “litter”), and Clinton pulled away afterwards.
