With McCain becoming the nominee of the Republican Party, the election will be really close or a blow out. In many respects this reminds me of the governor races in Michigan and Wisconsin. Granholm/DeVos was fairly widely played in the media at the time. Doyle/Green didn’t get much regional or national attention. In both cases, independents and moderates wildly swung the election. As would be expected with losing candidates, DeVos and Green also had more base erosion than the winners. Those two elections also challenged the prevailing view that moderates are basically a wash and turnout of the base is the key factor. In the case of the Green campaign, they were counting on a massive base turnout in Waukesha county. They got more votes there than they had modeled, but they still lost the general vote badly. In fact Green ended up losing the vote for governor in his own congressional district meaning he didn’t offer a coattail for the Republican candidate drafted to replace him.
The hope with a McCain candidacy is that he will stop the hemorrhaging of the independent vote. The danger of course is that he weakens his base vote. There are a couple ways of measuring this. One measure is the party breakout on election day. Depending on tightly you screen independents – there are independents who will insists they favor no party yet who haven’t voted against a particular party in decades – you will see a breakout of 40-20-40. Admittedly in Utah and Massachusetts, the model will look different. You could even call this a generic ballot. The generic ballot typically has a Democratic Party bias. The next measure to evaluate is the faithless party members. 10-15% is a safe predictor of the faithless, those who vote against their party. All indications at this point are that the Democrats are not going to have an issue here. Potential issues depend on the nominee and could include blacks, feminists, and hispanics.
The War in Iraq is probably the greatest issue for Republicans. There are many in the Republican Party who do not support the The War. Supporting McCain over Giuliani is one choice; supporting McCain over Clinton is another. I wouldn’t be shocked if the support McCain has received from those opposed to the Iraq War proves fickle come general election time. The religious base makes for some all around interesting commentary. In some respects he helps shore that base up. In other respects he disillusions that base. He hurts his chances with the base because he really isn’t a zealous pro-lifer. Yes, he rates highly with NRTL, basically a Republican pro-life advocacy group. He still doesn’t really have a compelling story for how his membership in the gang of 14 helped the pro-life movement in getting in their view good judges. While more of an insider’s game, his campaign finance reform bills have created enemies in many pro-life groups that he doesn’t need. On the positive side, his leadership against government sanctioned torture has allayed concerns among more politically moderate Christians that the Republicans believe in human rights. (To answer an immediate objection, human rights mean everyone has them. Civil rights are those rights protected by a government.) While I doubt that torture can ever become an over-riding issue like abortion has, I believe that it can be a straw for many Christians. For those more sympathetic to Democratic policies on welfare but who vote Republican over abortion, torture may have indeed kept them from voting for a Republican in the fall. These voters are already suspicious that their support of Republican candidates hasn’t done much for the pro-life cause. McCain’s nomination may be enough to retain them. Stem cell research is not being actively debated in this campaign, and I therefore don’t think people will vote on that basis.
With my prognosticator’s cap on, I would say that McCain loses Independents in the fall 70/30. I think he wins his base by only 80/20. The party allocation will be 40(D)/30(I)/30(R).
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