Nate Silver pulls a very interesting statistic from the exit polls:
One of the more interesting questions posed on this year’s exit polls was whether the voter had been contacted by the Obama and McCain campaigns personally about getting out to vote. Unfortunately, the exit poll consortium did not ask this question in all states, but it did in a dozen or so competitive states
(…)
The Obama campaign had a superior contact rate in 11 of the 12 battlegrounds; the only exception was West Virginia. Wisconsin was also relatively close, perhaps because Obama redirected its legion number of Illinois-based volunteers from Wisconsin to Indiana a couple of weeks in advance of the election.
The largest gaps, however, were in Indiana and out west in Colorado and Nevada, all places where Obama outperformed his polls on election day. (Unfortuntely, the exit surveys did not poll this question in New Mexico, where I’d expect you’d find similar numbers). Conversely, in West Virginia — the only state where McCain had a superior contact rate — Obama underpeformed his polls by several points on Tuesday.
We’re not just talking about small differences here either:
With the exception of Missouri, which some media outlets still list as too close to call, Obama won every state where he outperformed McCain in voter contact, and the numbers were similarly disproportionate on the national level:
Nationally, there was an 8-point gap in contact rate … the Obama campaign reached 26 percent of voters with its GOTV efforts to McCain’s 18 percent. This can be contrasted with 2004, when Kerry’s campaign contacted 26 percent of voters to Bush’s 24. Although Obama’s field operation was good, Kerry’s was pretty good too; the difference may be that while Bush’s field operation was also good, John McCain’s was not. It is also possible that Obama’s field operation was more efficient than Kerry’s, as the contact rate gap was larger in battleground than in non-battleground states. I have heard multiple stories of voters in states like Indiana receiving as many as three or four in-person contacts from the Obama campaign on Tuesday. This is a sign of a campaign that knew where the tipping points were, rather than (say) sending volunteers to Michigan on Election Day just to play it safe.
A few conclusions can be drawn from all of this. First, Obama ran a much better ground campaign than Kerry did in 2004 in that it was apparently more focused on states that would matter in the Electoral College race. Second, Obama ran a better ground campaign than McCain in those battleground states as the numbers above demonstrate. Third, McCain ran a significantly worse ground campaign than Bush did in 2004.
Was that the only reason he lost ? Probably not, but it is emblematic of what I think is the larger point — all other things being equal, John McCain ran what may well be the worst Presidential campaign since Bob Dole in 1996.
