Hm. Best/most plausible explanation as to why McCain/Palin are staking the election, it would seem, on the outcome in Pennsylvania:
If McCain wins all the states that President George W. Bush won four years ago, he’ll have the 270-plus electoral votes necessary to take the White House. (Mr. Bush won 286 electoral votes.) But with polls showing the Arizona senator trailing Obama, in some cases by significant margins, in at least six states that went red in 2004 - Colorado, Ohio, New Mexico, Iowa, Nevada, and Virginia - such a scenario appears extremely unlikely.
Even if McCain can hold Obama off in Florida and North Carolina, two 2004 red states where polls suggest a tight race, the likelihood of losses in other 2004 red states has forced the McCain campaign to look to states that went blue four years ago.
They don’t have many options. There are, polls suggest, only two states where a shift from blue to red seems within the realm of possibility. One is New Hampshire, where McCain is well liked and where some polls this month have shown the race in the single digits. (Others have shown a wide Obama advantage.) Even if McCain takes the state, however, he’ll secure just four electoral votes - hardly enough to offset substantial gains by Obama in red states.
The other blue state where McCain may have a chance is Pennsylvania, and that is where the McCain camp appears to have placed its bets. The Keystone State offers 21 electoral votes - enough to make up for losses in, for example, Virginia and Colorado - and it almost went red in 2004, with Democrat John Kerry taking the state by just 2.5 percentage points.
In addition, Obama did not fare well in Pennsylvania during the primaries. The Illinois senator lost to Hillary Clinton by 10 percentage points, in part because the state’s working-class white voters did not warm to him.
“McCain really has no choice but to give Pennsylvania a lot of attention, because it is the only fairly large state that Kerry won where McCain has any real chance of winning,” University of Pennsylvania political science professor Rogers M. Smith said. “And there is no path to 270 electoral votes in which he fails to take any Kerry states, because Obama is leading in some of the Bush states pretty decisively.”
