Dork's Final Week Battleground State Review – Indiana

[baldheadeddork]

For the last week of the race I'm doing a quick overview of the race in the battleground states. I'll bring up the polling, the general lay of the land and what to look for on election night. But I'm hoping that if you live here you'll chime in with what you're seeing.


Polling (11/1 - click links for current)
RCP: M+0.5
Pollster: M+0.5
Electoral Vote: M+2
FiveThirtyEight (projection): M+0.6

Early voting: In-person through 12pm Monday, November 3.

Polls close: 6pm EST

Why Indiana matters: On one level, it doesn't. The McCain camp has concluded that Indiana won't be the state that breaks their back. If they lose here, the election will already be lost in Ohio, Virginia, Florida, and maybe North Carolina and Georgia, too. If Indiana goes, it will be part of a landslide. If you want to stop reading right now, I won't blame you.

But, still, Indiana could go to Obama? Chuck Todd of NBC calls Indiana “the most surprising battleground state in this cycle”, more than Colorado, North Carolina or Virginia. He's not exaggerating. Indiana's devotion to Republican presidential candidates is legendary. Yeah, yeah...the last time they voted for a Dem was 44 years ago. Big deal, a lot of states can say that. But Indiana has only voted for a Democrat three times in the last hundred years. This is a state so solidly Republican that it had its fill of FDR after 1936. Neither is the state GOP is imploding as it is in Virginia. The incumbent Republican governor is likely to coast to reelection even though he used to be Bush's budget director. Not every state could recognize creating five trillion in new debt as a launching pad for a successful political career. And on top of all that, Indiana's history on race is more like Mississippi than the midwest. The Klan is not ancient history here. There's never been an African-American elected to statewide office, aside from Gary there's never been a black mayor of a large city, and only Indianapolis has sent an African-American to Congress.

None of that has changed in the last twelve months. So how the hell is Barack Hussein Obama within a less than a single point of John McCain among Indiana voters? Why did Obama target Indiana instead of other solid red states like Wyoming or Oklahoma, and why has it worked so well?

It's because Obama's campaign managers recognized some critical cracks in the Republican control of the state. Proximity to Illinois is only a very small part of that. During the primary Hillary Clinton actually did better than Obama in the part of the state that is reached by the Chicago media market. Nor does Indiana have a large population of minority voters, voters with a college education, or young voters. Indiana is below the national average on all of these measures, and well below other midwestern states that have been strong for Obama like Iowa and Wisconsin on at least two of them.

There are two things Obama's people saw that made Indiana appealing. One, there is a very large population of college students. Because of the large network of IU and Purdue satellite campuses and and the IVY Tech system of community colleges, more than five percent of Indiana's adult population is enrolled in college. That's Obama's only demographic edge in this state.

But that can be enough to make it competitive because Indiana historically has a small turnout. In 2004, 2.5 million people voted in the state. There are over 350,000 students in the state's universities. If dissatisfaction with the economy and Washington among traditional voters can get Obama within 200,000 votes, a strong turnout from college students and young voters can put him over the top.

Still, even if there are reasons for Obama to think he could win here, should he have spent so much time and money on an eleven EV state that John McCain isn't even contesting? That's the question that is at the heart of the fight between traditional Democrats like the Clinton's and Howard Dean's faction who now run the DNC. The Clinton strategy would have been to ignore Indiana and put this money into Ohio, Pennsylvania, or maybe Virginia. Dean and Obama want to challenge the GOP everywhere, not just for presidential contests but to build the organization to win state and congressional races.

That's already paying off. Indiana was the site of three huge upsets in the 2006 congressional races. Dems have a majority of Indiana's congressional delegation, and they could pick up another two seats this week. The Republicans are likely to keep the governor's mansion for another four years, and there are Republicans like Dick Lugar (and, regrettably, Dan Burton) who will probably keep their job for as long as they want to run. But everyone else is vulnerable. There is a crop of Dems coming up from the local offices that will be a factor in 2010 and beyond, and the network of volunteers and campaign staffers created by the Obama campaign isn't going anywhere.

If Obama's wins or loses, the days of Republicans taking Indiana for granted are gone.



What to look for on election night: Obama needs to run up huge margins in the Democratic strongholds of Lake (Gary), Marion (Indianapolis) and Monroe (IU) counties. He also needs to win by 5-10 points in Allen, Elkhart and St. Joseph counties.

But even then, he probably can't win if McCain matches Bush's performance in the rural counties. Unlike Missouri, Pennsylvania and Virginia, there are enough people in the rural counties to swamp the vote from Indy and the Gary/Hammond areas.

I'm going to be keeping an eye on Koscuiusko County in the north central part of the state. This is where I was hatched a few decades back, and it remains one of the strongest of the Republican strongholds. Bush won here by 75-23 and 78-21. I don't think Obama has a prayer in hell of winning this county. To the contrary, this is a place that is tailor made for McCain. It has a lot of orthopedic and medical device manufacturing that has been recession resistant, incomes are above the state average (incredibly rare for a rural county), there isn't a measurable population of college students, the closest Obama office is about an hour away, and the local Republican party is hella strong.

But I've got family there and I'm hearing a lot of grumbling from people who normally vote Republican or don't vote. If Obama goes from 21-23% to 35-40% in Kosciusko, that is hugely bad news for John McCain - and not just in Indiana.

Indiana won't be called until very late. But Kosciusko will report its actual vote totals early. Watch those numbers, and pay attention to the reports from the six counties I listed earlier.

[Fourstring]

Nice write up.

How's Bloomington play into the figures? I'd figure with the college economy it'd be a pretty blue-leaning, even without the students.

[baldheadeddork]

Bloomington is one of a few strong Democratic strongholds in Indiana. It's not a big town, just 50,000 votes were cast in Monroe county in 2004, but it's one of two counties where Dems can reliably pull out a seven-to-ten point margin.

The Obama people are trying to run up a much larger margin from Bloomington this year. When we voted on Saturday more than a third of the registered voters in Monroe county had already voted.

Nobody in the Obama offices will give a number they're looking for from Bloomington and Monroe. I think the floor is a net 10,000 votes for Obama, and it could go as high as 25,000.

[bassjones]

watch the third congressional race. If Souder wins big, McCain takes the state. If it's close or Montagano wins (which I highly doubt), it's a landslide and Obama will win Indiana and the election.

[baldheadeddork]

I'm still not going to put that much weight on the outcome of the race in the Third. I think Souder could lose his race while McCain wins the state by five or six points. One possible scenario for how that works is that there's enough Dem turnout in the third to beat a weak congressional candidate, but not enough to overcome a strong showing by McCain in other parts of the state like the Ohio River valley.

I can't see any way that Souder gets a big win. Both Research 2000 and Howey Gauge polls in October had Souder at 45 percent or lower. That's DOA territory for an incumbent, especially in a district that leans so strongly toward his party. He'd be lucky to survive those numbers in an off-year election. In a big year, when the Democratic opponent is pushing a large registration and GOTV operation, I don't think he has a prayer.

The race that could be very close is Buyer and Akerson in the 4th district. Akerson has been on the air in a big way in the last month and the Dems are running attack ads on Buyer's shitty voting attendance rating. IN-04 includes Purdue and western Monroe county, which has increasingly become a suburb of Bloomington. Strong turnout generated from the Obama campus operations at IU and Purdue could sink Buyer, but it's going to be close.

[bassjones]

he got endorsements from both Fort Wayne papers - including the one that endorsed Obama... I seriously don't think it's going to be very close. I think people are going to be more than a little nervous about sending a wet behind the ears kid to Washington over Souder, who is a senior member of a few committees and has a fairly substantial power base in congress. If he was a more likeable person it wouldn't be a contest at all, but he's a jerk - albeit an effective one - which makes Mikey more likeable. Souder's campaign ads have been brilliant too. Portraying Mikey as a spoiled brat punk kid. Rainbows behind his picture, all kinds of fun stuff.

[baldheadeddork]

We'll see, but there are some holes in your analysis.

Having seniority doesn't get you shit when you're in the minority party. You can't run a committee, your party never has a majority on any committee, and you have no inherit say in how legislation is put together. The only power he has is the power he can finesse out of the Dems who run his committees, and he's been a dick with them over the 12 years Republicans had control.

Newspaper endorsements don't means shit. Souder's broken promise on term limits is a much bigger deal.

Souder's "I'm a dick here, too" ads only look brilliant to someone who's likely to vote for him. It's the worst message he can send to independents in this election. McCain has run the same kind of ads and look at his numbers.