In short, the numbers released last night by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal are really bad for John McCain. Here's the key graph:
However, Obama has a seven-point advantage (46-39) among all white women. How important is that lead? Newhouse explains that Republican candidates always expect to win white men by a substantial margin, but it is white women that usually decide the race. "If a Republican wins among white women, we usually win that election," he says, noting that George W. Bush carried that group in 2000 and 2004.
A seven-point for Barack Obama among White women might not seem overwhelmingly remarkable at this juncture, even when taken together with the quote from GOP pollster Neil Newhouse regarding the importance of this demographic to the electoral success of the Republican Party. (Newhouse also mentions the suburban White women's vote, which I discuss a bit below the fold.) But looking through recent exit polling it becomes clear that these numbers could be borderline disastrous for the McCain campaign.
During his 2004 reelection victory, George W. Bush carried White women by a 55 percent to 44 percent margin over John Kerry -- meaning that Obama is already running ahead (or at least even) with Kerry in this demographic while McCain is running more than 15 points behind Bush within this key subgroup. In 2000, Bush narrowly won White women, 49 percent to 48 percent, and even during the Democrats' sound victory in the 2006 midterm elections GOP House candidates won White women's votes by a 50 percent to 49 percent margin. So not only is McCain running well behind where Bush ran in this demographic during his reelection campaign, McCain is also running significantly behind where Bush ran during his popular vote loss and where his party performed during their big loss in 2006. Just which candidate is it that has a problem among White women voters?
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Newhouse does point to numbers out of this poll showing McCain defeating Obama 44 percent to 38 percent among White suburban women, a demographic he says makes up about 10 percent of the electorate. But doing a little bit of math, estimation and triangulation, it becomes clear that this is nowhere near a significant number. There were 1,000 registered voters polled, meaning that there were somewhere in the neighbor of 100 White suburban women polled (judging by Newhouse's projection), a number that yields a margin of error of roughly plus or minus 10 percentage points. In other words, it's rather difficult to draw much of a conclusion based on the NBC/WSJ numbers in this regard.
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