Below The Beltway

With the poll numbers still looking quite bad, and the Electoral College projections looking even worse, it’s time to start wondering what, if anything, John McCain can do to turn this race around.

As the New York Times notes this morning, history suggests that McCain has an uphill battle if he wants to reverse the course of this election over the next 22 days:

In the latest Gallup tracking poll, Mr. Obama leads Mr. McCain 50 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. Mr. McCain’s deficit in that survey has remained seven percentage points or more for most of the last two weeks.

Since Gallup began presidential polling in 1936, only one candidate has overcome a deficit that large, and this late, to win the White House: Ronald Reagan, who trailed President Jimmy Carter 47 percent to 39 percent in a survey completed on Oct. 26, 1980.

Yet Mr. Carter, like Mr. McCain today, represented the party holding the White House in bad times. After Mr. Reagan successfully presented himself as an alternative to Mr. Carter in their lone debate, held on the late date of Oct. 28, he surged ahead. After two debates, Mr. Obama holds a lead that is approaching Mr. Reagan’s eventual margin of victory.

In 1968, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey all but erased a 12-point early-October deficit before losing narrowly to Richard M. Nixon. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore wiped out a seven-point deficit in the final 10 days of the election, winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College to Mr. Bush.

But since polling began, the pattern is that swings in opinion get smaller as Election Day approaches and voters gather more information. As American politics have grown more polarized, the opportunity for large swings has become smaller still.

And the number that McCain must aim for is clear:

Mr. McCain’s strategists acknowledge that for a realistic chance to win the election through battleground states, Mr. McCain must reduce Mr. Obama’s advantage in the national popular vote to no more than three or four percentage points.

As of this morning, Obama’s lead is just over seven percent according to the RealClearPolitics poll average.

So, how does McCain turn it around ? Suffice it to say there are plenty of pundits ready to offer suggestions.

Bill Kristol says that McCain must fire his entire campaign staff and start from scratch:

What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.

And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.

Provide total media accessibility on their campaign planes and buses. Kick most of the aides off and send them out to swing states to work for the state coordinators on getting voters to the polls. Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio — and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.

Kristol also says that McCain needs to stop the negative campaigning and banish the names Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright from all appearances:

Not because they’re illegitimate. I think many of them are reasonable. Obama’s relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is, I believe, a legitimate issue. But McCain ruled it out of bounds, and he’s sticking to that. And for whatever reason — the public mood, campaign ineptness, McCain’s alternation between hesitancy and harshness, which reflects the fact that he’s uncomfortable in the attack role — the other attacks on Obama just aren’t working. There’s no reason to think they’re suddenly going to.

Meanwhile, The Politico reports this morning that Republican insiders are urging McCain to focus on the economy rather than Barack Obama’s past associations:

Top Republican strategists believe John McCain’s stalled presidential campaign can only be revived if the Arizona senator takes an immediate and decisive turn in direction, one marked by an almost unwavering focus on the economy and a sharp break from Bush administration economic policy.

While Barack Obama’s past associations with controversial figures such as former radical William Ayers should be a part of McCain’s closing argument, they say, the GOP nominee needs to primarily concentrate on the historic nature of the current economic crisis and explain why he is better suited to lead the country out of it.

“Either McCain wins the argument over the economy or he loses,” said Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House. “When the economy is this central to everybody’s life, when everybody is as worried as they are now, then when you are not talking about the economy you are not winning.”

(…)

Whit Ayers, a longtime Republican pollster, was equally direct. “It’s hard to imagine the voters thinking about anything else when the Dow Jones is dropping 500 points a day,” he said.

Quite frankly, that’s something that the McCain Campaign should have realized that weeks ago when the market started tanking and the crisis began. Instead, McCain essentially ignored it for one week, engaged in the pointless and phony gambit of suspending his campaign for the next, and then let himself be associated with a bailout plan that the public just doesn’t like.

There’s still time for McCain to turn this around, but it’s going to require him to act differently than he has for months now. And I still don’t think it will be enough.