John McCains campaign has seen significant progress in internal polling in the last week, Republican pollster Bill McInturff said Tuesday, with notable strides among rural voters and soft Democrats.
McInturff, the campaigns chief pollster, made a case for the viability of the campaign in a memo to the strategy team, which was released to the media late Tuesday. The campaign has seen the race between McCain and Barack Obama move significantly over the past week, McInturff said. All signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday.
To be sure, public polling data both nationally and in battleground states tell a different story. Obama has a several-point lead nationally and has broken the 50% barrier in many battleground states.
But each campaign conducts extensive polling of its own and, according to McInturff, the McCain campaign has reason to be hopeful.
The strongest sub-groups for McCain are non-college men and rural voters of both genders, McInturff said. The campaign has also seen more reason to hope that they will get more than a 20% chunk of soft Democrats. Wal-Mart women, which the campaign describes non-college-educated women in households making less than $60,000 a year, are swinging back solidly, McInturff said.
Undecided voters make up about 8% of the electorate in battleground states, McInturff said, and represent an older, rural and economically challenged voter bloc. McInturff said their surveys had found them to be quite negative and seek change, but tend to skew Republican.
This partisan advantage is a critical element to understanding our capacity to get these voters, McInturff said.
Also, because of Obamas overwhelming strength among African American voters, McInturff concluded that many of the undecideds are either white or Latino.
McInturff predicted extraordinarily high voter turnout as much as 130 million voters based on the level of excitement and interest in this election. Voters polled in 2000 were asked to rate their interest on a scale of one to 10; a little more than half picked 10. This year, however, that percentage is climbing steadily as Election Day nears, with 81% of respondents Monday night offering up a 10. Wow, McInturff wrote in the memo.
The highest turnout will come from two demographic groups predisposed towards Obama: African American voters and voters age 18-29.
In Joe the Plumber, the campaign seems to have found a storyline that sticks. Nearly six out of 10 voters in battleground states said they had heard a lot about that storyline, with more than eight in 10 saying they had heard a lot or some. The campaign has also succeeded in labeling Obama a liberal, according to McInturff, with 59% of respondents in battleground states describing him as such.
