It was a week ago today that I wondered aloud here at MyDD as to why in the world John McCain was up with ads in West Virginia, spending more than 7 percent of his media buys between the beginning of May and the middle of June in a state George W. Bush carried handily in 2004. Now we know why.

ohn McCain begins the general election season with an eight-point advantage over Barack Obama in West Virginia. The first Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of this general election match-up shows McCain attracting 45% of the vote while Obama earns 37%.

Neither man is terribly popular in the state. McCain earns favorable reviews from 48% and unfavorable ratings from another 48%. The numbers for Obama are 40% favorable and 57% unfavorable. Those figures include 26% with a Very Unfavorable opinion of McCain and 35% with such a negative view of Obama.

Now for as bad as McCain's numbers are in West Virginia, you can see that Barack Obama's numbers there are actually worse. And in elections between the unpopular and the more unpopular, it's generally the merely unpopular that win.

But these numbers suggest that although Obama is comparatively weaker in Appalachia than he is in other corners of the country, McCain isn't really the best person to capitalize on this situation. I think it highly likely that McCain will win West Virginia, as well as states like Kentucky and Tennessee. That said, if the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee are finding themselves spending money in the fall to ensure that they're winning states like West Virginia, this isn't going to be a terribly close election.