A Contrarian Thought

So I took it easy this beautiful Sunday morning — amazingly for November in KC, the sun is shining and the temps are headed towards 80 degrees — and watched MSNBC and a couple of the talking heads shows. One common theme, over and above the general bloviation and predictions and posturing, was that there is going to be a huge turnout on Tuesday and that is to Obama’s advantage. Indeed a few people said he would need high turnout to win.

Okay, so essentially everyone who knows me considers me a contrarian, if not an outright curmudgeon. F.I.N.E. I’ll play to type and say that this time around the analysts have it largely if not completely backwards. If we start hearing that turnout is less than expected on Tuesday that’s “edge to Obama.” This year is fundamentally different from prior ones in a few key ways

1. By Tuesday over a third of the people will already have voted, and based on all the surveys that vote strongly favors Obama — I’ve heard figures as high as 60-40 although that seems optimistic. Hence, Obama is running up a big lead in key states and the fewer people who vote later the fewer the possibilities of McCain coming back.
2. By all counts Obama has the better ground game and is more likely to be getting his people to the polls on Tuesday. Moreover — and this is well into the “boggles the mind” category — the McCain campaign has been taking money out of GOTV efforts to increase advertising in states like Pennsylvania and Iowa. Apparently his some of his field people have been told they’ll have to foot their own air fare, housing and car rentals.
3. Every poll has Obama way ahead in terms of how enthusiastic and motivated his supporters are.

All this suggests to me that if turnout is less than the record expected on the 4th it will be because disaffected Republicans either chose to stay home or, on seeing long lines at the polls (long but still not record that is) decided they had a better way to spend a few hours than standing in line for a candidate who doesn’t enthuse them.

So perhaps it’s just my contrarian nature, but that’s how I see it.

UPDATE: So I caught This Week with George Stephanopoulis late in the day and on their roundtable they did indeed point out that this point heavy turnout works more to McCain’s advantage than Obama’s. Makes me a little more certain I got it right.

Then again, each and every one of them predicted an Obama win with, if I remember right, 348 being the lowest estimate for his EV total, and that was from Matt Dowd who said it should be considered a “floor.” We can only hope.