At RCP, Jay Cost revisits the ongoing discussion about whether Barack Obama can win working class whites in the general election, from two different but equally interesting perspectives. His first take on the issue circles around a look at Clinton’s primary victories in the counties of metropolitan Pittsburgh compared to the general election performance of Republican candidates dating back to 1972.  He presents a chart showing that: (a) Reagan did not

Former tabloid big Bonnie Fuller notes that Camp Obama is using popular mass-media vehicles such as People, Us Weekly, The View, Access Hollywood and The Colbert Report to “present Michelle and Barack as the beloved Brangelina of the political world.”  Regular pw readers will recall that Dan and I took note of the Us Weekly cover. This strategy is worth viewing in the context of Jay Cost’s argument that the portrayal of Obama as a Messiaianic

RCP’s Jay Cost notes (as noted here) that John McCain’s campaign still seems like a pudding without a theme, but also argues that Barack Obama’s campaign “is built around a faulty, occasionally absurd meta-narrative”: Obama’s narrative should be similar to [Bill] Clinton’s [i.e., generational change can invigorate a tired government and grow a sagging economy]. It’s tailor-made for a year like this and a man like Obama. But that is not the

Dark Lord Karl Rove and RCP’s Jay Cost both look at Barack Obama’s bold general election ad campaign.  Rove questions the whether spending nearly $20 million in early TV advertising is prudent.  Cost argues that the buy is more about framing Obama’s campaign in an aggressive posture than the actual expectations of the campaign. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s PowerPoint presentation to fundraisers tends to support Cost’s argument, as it suggested that

At Salon, Democratic pollster Paul Maslin looks at whether the youth vote can deliver the presidency to Barack Obama.  Most of Maslin’s point echo my assessment of the youth vote from May 26, but it is always good to get independent confirmation.  Maslin agrees that even a large increase in the youth vote would produce only a small impact on the actual makeup of the electorate: Despite the gains of 2004, however,

RCP’s Jay Cost has a series of bar charts reviewing Barack Obama’s voting coalition.  Most of these review Obama’s performance versus Clinton, which makes them of limited interest in the context of the general election.  The final chart, however, addresses the contribution of blacks, wealthy voters and young whites to Obama’s voting base — statistics which may say something about a general election.  Eyeballing the chart suggests that blacks made

When Gary Mayor (and Barack Obama backer) Rudy Clay started hinting that a shocker might come out of late-reporting Lake County, IN, someone in Hillary Clinton’s campaign was probably tasked with pulling the video of Bob Beckel on FNC, telling the story of some primary in which he asked a prior mayor of Gary when the votes would be coming in and was asked how many votes he needed.  But it

At RCP, Jay Cost prints the text of a speech he gave to a conference at Princeton University on the national party organizations – and their capacity to manage an election like this one. I disagree with Cost’s claim that the public will have a clear choice between two distinct political visions in the general election.  Nevertheless, his observations on the inability of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic

Over the weekend, RCP’s Jay Cost noted that the movement in the PA polls was strikingly similar to the movement in the OH pre-primary polls.  Cost avers that past is not necessarily prologue, but notes that there are reasons to expect them to move in tandem.  So it is worth keeping in the back of the mind that Clinton outpolled the RCP average in OH. The RCP average in PA

Before we were unavoidably detained yesterday, the WaPo’s Chris Cillizza considered Barack Obama’s Clingy Kerfuffle by borrowing a question from Hoosier Axl Rose: “Where Do We Go Now?” Cillizza looks at several factors which could cause Obama’s comments to become a blip or part of a larger Narrative — ads, polls, superdelegates, the PA results, media coverage of the Pope’s visit, and miscellaneous “X-Factors.”  What follows is a look at most of