Why John McCain Trails in the Polls

US Election Campaign

The Republicans are going into the last week of the campaign with mixed emotions. John McCain clearly seems to be making up ground in the polls, but the Presidential candidate is appearing again and again in front of sparsely attended campaign events. In the opinion of Republican political strategists, McCain’s campaign has many problems.

It’s becoming lonely around John McCain a week before the American Presidential election. As the Republican candidate was holding a rally in New Mexico over the weekend, a few hundred of his supporters got lost on the fairgrounds. Not far away, in Colorado, approximately 100,000 fans were going to see his opponent, Democrat Barack Obama. Well-known Republicans are publicly distancing themselves from McCain. Within his circle of advisors, the search for those responsible for the looming election defeat has already begun. After eight years in the White House, the Republican Party is exhausted, and a battle is imminent over its future direction.

The Republicans are going into the last week of the campaign with a feeling of gloom. Again and again, McCain is appearing in front of sparsely attended campaign events. His advisors are reacting to this with a mixture of gallows humor and defiance. McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said that “if campaigns were won or lost based on crowd size, Barack Obama’s crowd of 200,000 in Berlin would’ve made him chancellor of Germany.” McCain’s painful lack of appeal is certainly displaying itself in the polls showing him behind. The “Washington Post” had him at 45 percent to Obama’s 52 percent.

The conservative prognosticator David Frum, a former speech writer for President George W. Bush, has already drafted a bitter obituary of McCain’s campaign. “There are many ways to lose a presidential election,” Frum wrote in Sunday’s “Washington Post.” “John McCain is losing in a way that threatens to take the entire Republican Party down with him.” Frum criticizes McCain’s erratic reaction to the financial crisis and his less than believable attempts to put down his opponent Obama as a friend of terrorists and as a socialist. “This strategy has mobilized the Republican core, but has alienated and offended the great national middle, which was the only place where the 2008 election could have been won.”

What Frum chastises as “McCain’s awful campaign” is also having other Republicans distancing themselves. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Bush’s former White House Press Secretary have publicly stated that they are endorsing Obama. They deplore the aggressive tone of McCain’s campaign and its narrow appeal to conservative voters. McCain, who was held the mantle of ideological independence, has not stopped the rightward shift. Former Republican governors from Massachusetts and Minnesota have recently broken away from McCain. They were disenchanted with his campaign and acknowledged Obama as an exceptional candidate who has what it takes to be a great president.

McCain has to deal with an extraordinary combination of unfavorable circumstances. For one thing, discontent with President Bush’s record reaches deep into the Republican Party. The economic crisis and the astronomical budget deficit are nibbling away at the Republicans image of themselves, who have long claimed the title of fiscal responsibility. For another thing, unlike his charismatic rival, McCain’s appeal reaches into the conservative camp. Nominal Republicans find in Obama what they miss in their own party, things like pragmatism, a willingness to weigh the pros and cons, and the rhetorical gift of encouragement to an insecure nation.

McCain’s former adviser Mark McKinnon told the online magazine “Politico” that the “back-stabbing and blame game” in McCain’s team had already started. McKinnon left McCain’s team because he did not want to support the aggressive campaign strategy. Another McCain worker anonymously described the mood among the election staff like this: “We’re entering the finger-pointing and positioning-for-history part of the campaign. It’s every man for himself now.”