Kevin Drum
asks:
In 2004, John Kerry lost the popular vote by a couple of percentage points and the electoral vote by 120,000 votes in Ohio. Now, suppose Kerry were running this year and therefore had the following three advantages over his previous self: (a) he was running after eight years of Republican rule instead of four, (b) the economy sucked, and (c) he had a fantastic fundraising advantage over his Republican opponent.Question 1: how well do you think Kerry would do? Question 2: how well do you think Obama is going to do this year? Question 3: how big is the difference between the answers to Q1 and Q2?
I
asked a variant of this question awhile back (and so, according to
TNR, did John Kerry), but decided later that when comparing 2004 to 2008, you really have to include John McCain in the query. And I think John Kerry would lose in a race against John McCain. Even now.That's because of what Kerry, at base, represented. Democrats nominated John Kerry because he was the next best thing to John McCain. He was a war hero, he'd supported the Iraq War, his profile was primarily on foreign policy, etc. John Kerry even tried to make John McCain his running mate. It was, all in all, a political strategy based on the appeal of the then-dominant political figure John McCain. Running a sort of pale imitation of John McCain against John McCain would probably have been a bad idea. That Obama is
extremely different from John McCain has been an advantage. If, conversely, he was a longtime veteran of Washington who had supported lots of unpopular policies and voted in favor of the Iraq War, he may well be having a tougher time of it. Indeed, it's sort of the consensus view that a white Democrat would be winning by a lot right now, but given the partisan breakdown of the country, it's actually rather hard to imagine Hillary Clinton or John Kerry winning by more than 7 or so points (Obama is at 7.3% according to Real Clear Politics). There are a lot of concerns that his vote won't manifest because Obama is black, but maybe his vote will manifest. And maybe he'll have even more votes due to high turnout among African-Americans, young people, etc. Obama's race has presented a lot of uncertainty, but it's hard to look at the numbers and really sense that his race is holding down his margins. This is still a pretty closely divided country yet we're in a fairly lopsided election. I don't think the margins could stretch out much further.
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