The McCain camp is understood to be making tough decisions on where to campaign in the dying days of the race, now regarding Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa as falling out of Senator McCain’s reach. All three states voted for George W.Bush in 2004.
Australian News

McCain is concentrating all his efforts on a last-ditch attempt to win Pennsylvania, in an attempt to squeak by in the election. As 538 notes, his campaign has also stopped allocating money to ads in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Maine and Minnesota. See also the CNN article on giving up on colorado which raises the point:

The McCain campaign is looking at an Electoral College strategy heading into the final two weeks that has virtually no room for error and depends heavily on a dramatic comeback in Pennsylvania, which hasn’t backed a Republican for president in 20 years.

In some ways, I think the big victor of this campaign is the 50 state strategy that the democratic party switched to using in 2006. Howard Dean’s strategy was to campaign in all the states and try to win in all the states rather than to come up with a game plan for winning just slightly more than 50% of the electoral votes (which was the plan of the RNC (Republicans) and the DLC — a splinter group of democrats run by the Clintons distinguished from the DNC (what folks usually think of when they think Democrat.))

McCain, because he had the now traditional² ‘win just enough’ strategy¹, has been acting on following through with winning the key states and not trying hard in the states he didn’t need to win. Palin, perhaps, is symptomatic of this strategy — since you’re only trying to win the states where you need to win (considering anything else as a bonus), you have to concentrate on appealing to and getting out the base and not the country overall. This is also what conceptually drives the idea of ‘real america.’ Those plans are now upset and he’s now struggling with the narrowing alternatives.

Obama benefits by the work that the Democrats generally have been doing over the last several years, and also by his own campaign, which is quickly becoming omnipresent in towns and areas where you wouldn’t expect them. As the tide comes in, you note other things, like McCain using call centers and having trouble getting volunteers to fill its call centers while Obama’s campaign is relying on volunteers.

Obama’s campaign is a return to the idea sloganeered by “democracy is an efficient marketplace of ideas,”⁴ which is why he’s been moving slowly to the center as the general election proceeds while McCain’s “control from the strong position” strategy moves followers of it inexorably further out to the edges.³ This also gets reflected in the rhetoric — while Obama is now comfortably claiming traditional republican talking points like the middle class and taxes, McCain has the wilder route of negative campaigning left because he has to make sure that all his constituents are as motivated as possible to show up by whatever means he can dredge up.

So, I guess we’ll see.

On a lighter note, hilarious hockey advertisement tangentially related to this post.

¹ and also an inheritor of the GOP’s anti-african american Southern Strategy.
² whose recent implementation was the brainchild of Karl Rove.
³ WJ Clinton’s campaign being an exemplar of this, as he would sit on the center and seize on ideas from both sides like they were hot interns.
⁴ I lifted this phrase from Tongodeon.

With 91 percent of the state’s precincts counted, Clinton led Obama 51 percent to 49 percent, with about 20,000 votes separating the two U.S. senators, CNN reported. Votes were reported late coming in from Lake County in northwestern Indiana near Chicago.
from this article @ UPI

Clinton’s earlier reported leads were largely based on the fact that Lake County took its sweet time to report polls, and it was a strong supporter of Obama, as prefigured. Clinton is continuing onwards and upwards. Clinton lost ground by about 8 delegates today and appears in no danger of actually catching up any time soon.

Before flying out of Indiana to Washington DC, as the networks were still agonizing over the rustbelt state, Clinton proclaimed victory there and said it was “full speed on to the White House.”
from here

Clinton appears to be pinning her hopes on using the DLC to beat the DNC into submission over the delegates that were ruled out due to election irregularities (and where she won because she ran unopposed.) The DLC is a subgroup of democrats, more conservative, that is pretty much backing her at this point, and has been ominously waving hands to spoil the election if she doesn’t get the ticket, by sponsoring lots of polls saying that Clinton voters wouldn’t vote for Obama.

The DLC is doing a lot of weird marketing crap, like marketing Chicago as the DLC Conversation rather than the Democratic Convention. It’s weird how their goal is to engineer a takeover of the party by near-threat rather than to attempt to win outright. The claim that this is to appeal to centrists, but mostly it just defies logic.

The biggest difference, which seems this time to have shot Clinton in the foot, is the 50 state strategy, which has democratic candidates trying to win in every state, rather than the DLC which aims to leverage victory by just winning a few small states outside of the democratic core.

Basically, to win the primary, Clinton is relying on people who will be voting for McCain in the general election. Because Clinton and McCain are relying on the same groups as their core woters — less educated, largely white counties, she’s got a bigger chance of being Kerry part II in the general election. Here’s a graphic from the New York Times that explains it: obama versus clinton.

Meanwhile, because Obama’s been competing in all 50 states, he’s got a lot more states that are far more securely locked down than Clinton, but that will be the subject of my next post. It appears that Clinton’s going to have to pull some sort of bullshit at the convention to win, and then is well-placed to lose the general election. joy.