This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: October 8, 2008 - Throughout the summer and early fall, as polling groups released new data and news organizations updated their presidential election maps, political junkies played a guessing game: What color would Missouri be?
Early on, the smart money was on a shade of red. Polls showed Republican nominee John McCain leading his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, by at least 5 percentage points in a state that has leaned right in recent presidential contests. Still, no one -- not even GOP operatives -- considered Missouri Cardinal red.
Now, it's looking more like magenta.
Polls indicate that Obama is gaining ground or has overtaken McCain in many key battleground states. RealClearPolitics, a website that aggregates polling data, shows Obama winning in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada and Colorado. RealClearPolitics considers Missouri a "toss up." The Illinois senator overtook McCain for the first time Monday since tracking began this summer. As recently as early September, the Arizona senator led by as much as seven points.
The latest Fox News/Rasmussen Reports survey has Obama at 50 percent and McCain at 47 percent. McCain led in that poll by 5 points a month ago, and Missouri has moved from a "likely Republican" to "toss-up" state within the past week. Obama holds an 11-point advantage among unaffiliated voters, poll numbers show.
Other polls also show the Missouri contest within the margin of error. A CNN/Time survey gives Obama a one-point edge. Research 2000, an opinion research firm, shows McCain leading by one point. And SurveyUSA gives the GOP nominee a two-point lead. These polls had consistently shown McCain with a lead over the summer.
"The last two weeks, not just in national tracking but also in state polls, Obama has had significant upswings," said Del Ali, president of Research 2000. "If I were to guess now, I'd say Obama would be up two or three points" in Missouri.
What's telling, Ali said, is that McCain isn't breaking the 50 percent mark in many of the states he was favored to win (including Missouri). In many cases, his polling numbers are staying the same or dropping slightly while Obama is gaining ground largely by capturing the undecided voter.
Ali and other analysts agree that Obama's surge in the polls is largely due to the unfolding financial crisis. Voters across the country say the economy is now their most pressing concern, and Obama tends to get higher marks than McCain in that realm. Ali said he'd estimate Obama would have a double-digit edge on the economy in many states.
"Voters haven't seen (McCain) engaged in the issue," he said. "In the last few weeks, I'd expect to see McCain focus on presenting an initiative or plan that strictly deals with the economy." (This prescient comment was made before last night's debate, in which McCain did just that by talking about a plan for relief of some distressed mortgage holders.)
Ali added that Obama was making up ground in Missouri and elsewhere even before Congress got together on the bailout plan. And after getting an initial boost in the polls from his vice presidential selection, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain likely lost points for the choice in recent weeks, Ali said.
Reading into the Polls
Four years ago, some polls showed President George Bush and Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry in a too-close-to-call race in Missouri. Bush emerged with a seven-point victory -- larger than his margin over then-vice president Al Gore in 2000.
It's tempting to draw conclusions from previous pre-election polls and final tallies, but it's also hard to compare 2004 with 2008. For one, Kerry pulled out of Missouri weeks before the election. (McCain has done the same in Michigan.) There was no financial crisis to weigh heavily on the minds of voters four years ago. And the president's approval ratings had yet to dip to historic lows.
While Obama's presidential fortunes have been helped by these political and economic circumstances, his campaign says it isn't reading too much into the increasingly favorable tallies.
"We don't live and die by poll numbers," said Justin Hamilton, Missouri press secretary for the Obama campaign. "We've known for a long time that this race was going to be neck and neck. Whoever wins will do so by a handful of points. It's always been a competitive state."
Then there's the question of whether Obama's polling numbers might actually be exaggerated. Many political analysts downplay the so-called "Bradley effect," in which more voters say they are willing to vote for a black candidate than end up doing so on Election Day. Its namesake, Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles in the early 1980s, lost a California governor's race despite holding double-digit leads in the polls in the weeks before the election.
An April study from Harvard University showed that the Bradley effect hasn't been in evidence nationally since the early 1990s. Terry Jones, a professor of political science and public policy administration at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, said he didn't see such voting patterns in state races across the country in 2006.
If voters are hesitant or unwilling to vote for a black candidate, they are likely to show up in polls under the undecided category, said Michael Minta, an assistant professor of political science at Washington University. Typically, they won't lie and say they are voting for the black candidate and then reverse course at the polls.
"What's interesting to me is that in both state and national polls, I haven't seen as many undecided voters as I would expect," he said. (In the SurveyUSA Missouri poll, for instance, only 2 percent of voters said they hadn't made up their minds.)
In the Democratic primaries, Minta added, polls in several states actually underestimated interest in Obama. Some black voters who had previously claimed an allegiance to the Clintons likely indicated being undecided when polled but ended up voting for Obama.
While Minta said there's no reason to doubt the accuracy of recent state polls in measuring attitudes four weeks before Election Day, he said he wouldn't be surprised to see Missouri eventually hedge toward McCain given Republicans' recent success in the state. Either way, Obama's showing in the polls is telling, he said.
"What's happening now, given the conditions of the country, is that more people are making decisions based on economic conditions and the war," Minta said. "This is becoming a referendum on the Republican administration. That's not to say that race won't play any role in the election."
Jones, the UMSL professor, said that while he wouldn't consider Missouri a bellwether state (Obama's percentage here is likely to be lower than his national percentage), it certainly is a battleground state. Obama's formula for victory, according to Jones, is high turnout among young and black voters, coupled with a closer than expected margin of victory for McCain in Missouri's outlying areas.
"If Obama does win in Missouri, it will mean that he wins easy (i.e., well over 300 electoral votes) nationally," Jones said in an e-mail.
A Ground Battle
With less than four weeks until Election Day and Missouri's 11 electoral votes up for grabs, campaign strategy is more under the microscope than ever. Can Obama's highly publicized "grassroots army" of organizers knock on enough doors? Will McCain's team be able to rally traditional Republican supporters and complete the party's legendary "72-hour push" before Nov. 4?
Hamilton, the Obama spokesman, said he's confident that the campaign's sustained presence in Missouri will pay off.
"I think we win because of our ground game," he said. "We've been here for months, registering voters, recruiting people, putting in the time and effort."
While the Obama camp isn't saying exactly how many paid staffers they have in Missouri, some estimates put the total at about 150. The McCain campaign has roughly 40 staff members in the state, according to Tina Hervey, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Republican Party. Obama's team reports having 43 field offices in the state -- some of which are located in traditional Republican strongholds. Hervey said McCain has 16 such offices.
Hamilton said the Obama campaign is also relying on roughly 2,500 volunteers who are spearheading efforts in their communities to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors and call even more voters before Election Day. The campaign announced that it had signed up nearly 15,000 new voters in a week and is on the way to hitting its goal of registering 5,000 new people. Registration in Missouri closes at 5 p.m. Wednesday.
Hervey said the onus is largely on the Obama campaign to overcome recent history in the state.
"There's a need for [the Obama campaign] to do a lot of converting and convincing," Hervey said. "We don't have that problem. We are a state that leans right, and independents often vote that way. For us, it's a completely different game. We have a message that resonates, and at the end of the day it's about turnout."
Hervey said the McCain campaign is confident that a push in the last days before the election -- including phone calls and personal visits -- will boost the GOP nominee much like it did for Bush in 2004 and 2000.
Like the Obama campaign, Hervey said McCain's staff in Missouri isn't reading too much into the poll numbers.
"We're happy with where everything stands," Hervey said. "Our message has resonated with people, and we've been ahead the entire summer. Obama is outspending us, and it's naive and silly for people to react to fluctuations in the polls now. With the Bailout, Americans have been all over the place. We're going to see things settle down, and after the debates I expect (McCain) will be back up."
And while Hervey classified Missouri as a "must-win for both candidates," the color-coded election maps now indicate that a McCain loss here would be more damaging than an Obama defeat.
"There is no formula I'm aware of -- no configuring of states -- that allows McCain to win without Missouri," Hamilton said.
Elia Powers is a freelance writer in St. Louis.