Mula!!

News today that Obama raised $52 million in the month of June. Rumors have been swirling around for a few weeks now (stemming from this WSJ article) that his June total would not surpass $30 mill, which would have led to lots of media bigwigs questioning his decision to opt out of public financing. Back when Obama opted out, about a month ago, and people set the standards for his monthly fundraising absurdly high, some began asking if this was a wise decision. I have a great amount of respect for the Obama campaign, and generally, I trust that the big decisions they make are done with intelligence and only after due process (i.e. internal debating, lots of research into the consequences, factual evidence, etc). So when he decided to opt out of public financing in mid-June, I assumed their fundraising totals for the month so far indicated they'd have no problems raising tons of money. If his purse was feeling light by the second week of June, they could have easily waited a few weeks or months before opting out of the public system. If there was any doubt, they would have waited. The fact that they made the decision when they did made it clear to me that they'd have no problem meeting the sky-high expectations.

Also, people should recognize that today's environment, both politically and economically, is much different than February (when he raised a record $55 million). The economy's worse off and people are much more concerned with their personal economic stability. And the urgency to donate NOW is not even close to what it was in February. So he's going to get less money from small donors than he did before, for all these reasons and more. But that doesn't mean he'll raise less altogether, because he now has access to and the support of (some of) Hillary Clinton's donors. While there are an elite set of HRC bundlers who are just too bitter about the primary race to support Obama, the majority are Democrats, through and through, and will happily throw their financial weight behind the Democratic nominee.

All in all, I would expect Obama to raise around $30-$40 million in July (remember, he's going to be abroad for about a week, meaning he'll only have 3 weeks to attend fundraisers). August is completely up in the air. I could see him pulling in $40 mill, but I could also see him getting some absurd amount like $5 million in one night (the last night of the Democratic convention) and setting a new record with something crazy like $60 mill. And from then on, the race is going to be much more exciting, meaning more people will be eager to get involved, and his small donations will go up again, allowing him to spend less time at fundraisers and more time on the trail (his formula for success during the primary).

Is Obama Winning?

Obama's found himself in a strange conundrum with the mainstream media. Most everyone has rightfully concluded that every meta factor favors the Democratic candidate these days. I won't list them here, but you can look at any poll of party preferences, and you'll see that the Republicans are in deep, deep trouble.

This leads to the current conventional wisdom: Obama should be wiping the floor with McCain right now, surely by the high single digits, if not more. And if he's not, then there has to be something wrong with Obama, something that's leaving voters unsure of him, uncommitted to his candidacy.

So when a new poll comes out showing Obama with a 5 point lead, the media treats this as bad news for Obama. A recent ABC/Washington Post showed Obama with an 8 point lead, but the story they chose to push was voter uneasiness with him as commander in chief, or people unsure of who to trust on Iraq. A month ago, when he was up by 5 points in almost every poll, the story was "Obama Struggles to Pick Up Clinton Supporters," or something along those lines. Well, if this is struggling, then once he manages to shore up these tiny leaks in the Obama cruise ship, he'll win by 15-20 points, which has never happened in modern presidential history.

I can understand distinguishing between a 1% win in the popular vote and a 7% win. A really close election will not help Obama "unite the country." But you don't get an extra room in the White House for winning by 10 points instead of 5. A win is a win.

And be prepared for the inevitable bump McCain will get from his convention, when the media, with a vested interest in making the election seem close, will portray this as a dogfight.

Same Message, New Result?

Elizbeth Holmes and Laura Meckler in today's Wall Street Journal:

John McCain will spend the coming week talking about the economy, but the Republican presidential candidate isn't expected to say anything new. Rather, he will repackage proposals he has already outlined -- ones the campaign fears nobody heard.

I think they clearly had no choice but to "relaunch" the campaign. I'm just not sure much will change. For starters, they're going to spend the first week of the new campaign talking about the economy, the issue that is both most important to voters, but also where McCain's policies most closely mirror President Bush. There's a reason McCain prefers talking about terrorism; well, there's multiple reasons. But aside from not knowing much about the economy, it's the only issue on which voters trust McCain more than Obama. And McCain is not going to win over voters by repeating word for word Bush's reassurance: "The fundamentals of our economy remain strong."

The WSJ article also lays out the small but significant changes Steve Schmidt is bringing to the campaign in an attempt to control and refine their message. Unfortunately, the nature of the candidate is proving a hindrance to producing a slicker campaign. For starters, McCain is averse to set speeches, and is in his element when engaging voters in town hall style discussions. But voter questions are unscripted*, forfeiting a good deal of topic control. Schmidt has a plan here:

Now, most town halls will begin with a scripted speech wound around a topic of the day. Sen. McCain is then supposed to weave that topic through his answers and come back to it at the end.

Given McCain's proven ability to steer every question towards terrorism (see this Fortune magazine article), I suppose it's plausible he could do the same for other issues.

* Schmidt is a veteran of the Bush campaigns, known, among other things, for their tightly scripted campaign events. Will Schmidt risk McCain's "straight talk" brand for tighter message control?

McCain the Underdog

Liz Sidoti of the AP has a remarkably scathing article out today about the McCain campaign's shortcomings and failures thus far. I get the feeling, both from this article and many others in the past, that McCain is most comfortably kind of flying along by the seat of his pants. His campaign believes it won the Republican nomination by sheer force of candidate will. There's no doubt that McCain's comeback win in the New Hampshire primary, merely months after his campaign had essentially gone broke, was almost entirely a result of the candidate's skills and his dogged campaigning. But it wasn't all that surprising. He was historically popular in the state, having won their primary in 2000.

In reality, McCain won the Republican nod by default amidst a demonstrably weak field of candidates. Romney never caught on, despite spending enormous sums of money. Huckabee was never a serious challenger. Obama's comeback was actually much more impressive (he trailed Clinton by 20-30 points in the national polls all the way up to the Iowa caucuses).

McCain apparently likes to brag to donors about his come-from-behind credentials, saying, "We are the underdog. That's what I like to be." That's not going to reassure anybody. The AP story, while certainly not the first to outline the litany of complaints from Republican spectators, is still pretty devastating to read. The McCain camp is behind in money, staff, strategy, and message. If you asked me to describe in, say, five words or less Obama's theme against McCain, I'd immediately say "McCain = Bush Third Term." That's the meme his campaign hits in every speech, on every conference call, on every talk show. It's simple and consistent.

I would have no idea how to answer the same question about the McCain campaign. "Obama is a flip flopper?" That's largely a media narrative (reporters love nothing more than finding contradictions in a candidate's record), and McCain's ability to use this line of attack is severely hampered by his own well-documented position changes. "Words vs Action?" It didn't work out for Clinton. And McCain, through his 21 years in government, has done remarkably little in terms of kitchen table issues. His trademark legislation is campaign finance reform, hardly a salient issue. And his other accomplishment was favoring the surge strategy in Iraq. Few would argue that the addition of thousands and thousands of troops has increased stability in Iraq. Regardless, it hasn't changed public opinion, and unless the people start to turn around on the Iraq war, McCain's going to have to spend a ton of time convincing the American public that we should stay in Iraq and that it was a good idea to go there in the first place.

It's a good sign for Republicans that Steve Schmidt is taking over day-to-day operations of the campaign. He's a first rate campaign strategist, and should bring a steady hand to a campaign that's been routinely scatter shot in it's messaging and strategy. McCain will spend the next week in swing states talking about the economy (which he hates to talk about, by the way). This is a step in the right direction (maybe he'll even have the cajones to tell McCain 'no' next time he wants to travel to South America during the campaign). But McCain won't win on the economy. Even if he was knowledgeable and fluent about the issues (which he's not), the public is not going to vote for more of the same (and if there's one thing where McCain echoes Bush word for word, it's the economy). Still, it's important for voters to know that he's cognizant of people's struggles, and next week's tour, if nothing else, can help him accomplish that.

People Tune Out

Yglesias argues that the media's tendency to focus on meaningless campaign stories does not, in the end, have a huge impact on election outcomes. I tend to have a more nuanced view of this.

I agree that most voters could not care less what Gen. Wesley Clark said or didn't say about John McCain's military service, no matter how much press coverage it gets. There are just too many big issues on voters' minds, from $4.00/gallon gas to the country's two wars. And as Sean over at FiveThirtyEight points out, there's new evidence courtesy of the Pew Research Center that proves just how irrelevant these stories are. Here's the key chart, tracking the percentage of Democrats, Republicans and Independents who followed campaign news "very closely" over the last 17 months:

Sean notes that the "very close" public interest dropped sharply (10-15% for all three blocs) around the time of the Bittergate remarks and the Jeremiah Wright stories in mid-March. Sean writes:

Counterintuitively for those who voraciously consume political news and have an emotional investment in the outcome, just when it seems like everything is becoming Urgent with a capital U because of some particular story, that very well may be when the aggregate of millions are tuning out.

So it's true that voters generally pay less attention to the media when the press coverage gets nasty, thereby limiting the media narrative's affect. But there's also an important role that the media should perform, and that is informing voters. When the voting public tunes out the press, the result, I imagine, is an uninformed public, not exactly the calling card of a healthy democracy.