Campaign Diaries

In the final stretch before Election Day, campaigns typically focus on an increasingly narrow list of swing states - but this year new battlegrounds are emerging left and right.

A few weeks ago, West Virginia suddenly looked like a very promising state, and though recent polling has not shown the race to be that competitive, the Obama campaign did buy air time. We also started hearing about a potential Obama investment in Kentucky - though that does not appear to have come to pass.

But the Obama campaign just announced that it would start or resume advertising in three red states: Georgia, North Dakota and McCain’s home state of Arizona. Obama advertised in the first two states throughout the summer, only to scale back his efforts in mid-September when it appeared that McCain was finally putting marginally competitive red states away. But both have now tightened, so much so that the Atlanta Journal Constitution is calling Georgia a nail-biter.

The real stunner, however, is Obama’s decision to make a play for Arizona. No one doubts that Arizona would have been a highly competitive race had the Republican nominee not been the state’s Senator, but it is very rare for a candidate to lose his home state (Al Gore’s failure to hold on to Tennessee cost him dearly, but Gore had not represented his state in years).

But Obama’s strength among Hispanics and among Western independent voters give him a shot at picking-up the state’s 10 electoral votes. A surprising deluge of Arizona polls have been released over the past few days, and nearly all have shown the race within the margin of error. (A new Research 2000 poll shows McCain’s lead down to 1%.)

Et tu, Arizona?

(It is interesting to see that Obama’s ads in the state will be a positive one, whereas he is airing attack ads in Georgia and North Dakota; similarly, Move On is also going up on air in Arizona on Obama’s behalf, also with a positive ad. Democrats apparently do not want to antagonize Arizona voters who have a long relationship with the Republican nominee.)

Whether or not the state will fall to the Obama column is not as important as the fact that the McCain campaign has been forced to schedule its final rally on Monday night in Arizona. That’s right, the very last public event held by McCain before Election Day will not take place in a giant Florida auditorium or against glorious Virginia backdrop - venues that could generate some much-needed momentum for the GOP - but in Arizona, whose 10 electoral votes where the last thing on anyone’s mind until this past week-end.

This development alone summarizes McCain’s predicament: He has been forced to scale back his efforts in all blue states except Pennsylvania (as the latest list of the campaigns’ state by state spending confirms) and has had to invest more and more time defending red states that Obama absolutely does not need but where a victory would seal an electoral college majority: Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, even North Carolina - none of these are in the top tier of states that are expected to get Obama above 270, but McCain is so weak in all of them that he has to take time away from Nevada, Colorado, Virginia, Ohio and Florida - all states he also needs to win!

That the McCain campaign is now forced to implement a national strategy in the hope of narrowing the gap nationally and in the process gain in some of these red states is evident in the remarkable news (reported by the Washington Post) that McCain is scaling back the GOP’s famed 72-hour turnout operation to invest more money on TV ads.

At first, this decision can seem insane: McCain is already facing a huge organizational disadvantage, so why would he dig himself in a deeper hole? But his campaign has no other choice: The 72-hour program is meant to win close races, and it can certainly perform beautifully (and a large share of Bush’s victory can be attributed to his top-notch turnout effort). It is not meant to move the race by more than a couple of points - and that is McCain’s task now. He has to close a high single-digit gap in Colorado, Virginia, Pennsylvania and perhaps Nevada. Unless he shifts momentum, convinces undecided voters and some voters who have already settled on Obama, no amount of organizational muscle will allow him to mount a comeback.

In other important news from battleground states

• The North Carolina Board of Elections has agreed to extend early voting by four hours on Saturday, meaning that voters can cast a ballot until 5pm on the first day of the week-end. Democrats were worried that thousands of voters would be left unable to cast a ballot had the polls closed at 1pm. This follows a decision by Florida Governor Charlie Crist to extend voting hours by four hours a day all week.

• A federal judge ordered Pennsylvania’s Secretary of the Commonwealth to distribute paper ballots.

• In Colorado, more than 35,000 new voters who requested mail-in-ballots are at risk of having their ballot disqualified because of voter identification rules.

• In a blow to the GOP’s plans to challenge voters at the polls on Tuesday, a judge ruled that Ohio residents do not have to have an actual address to cast a ballot and that a homeless voter is eligible if his only “residence” is a park bench.