Obama Leads, Pessimism Reigns Among Key GroupBy Michael D. Shear and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 4, 2008; A01
Democratic Sen. Barack Obama holds a 2 to 1 edge over Republican Sen. John McCain among the nation's low-wage workers, but many are unconvinced that either presidential candidate would be better than the other at fixing the ailing economy or improving the health-care system, according to a new national poll.
Obama's advantage is attributable largely to overwhelming support from two traditional Democratic constituencies: African Americans and Hispanics. But even among white workers -- a group of voters that has been targeted by both parties as a key to victory in November -- Obama leads McCain by 10 percentage points, 47 percent to 37 percent, and has the advantage as the more empathetic candidate.
Still, one in six of the white workers polled remains uncommitted to either candidate. And a majority of those polled, both white and minority, are ambivalent about the impact of the election, saying that no matter who wins, their personal finances are unlikely to change.
"It's not my main concern in life," said Mary Lee, 50, a factory worker in rural Kentucky. "I know how politics is. I really don't think it's going to matter either way."
More than disaffection drives these workers, according to the new national poll by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.
Their politics are shaped partly by their lot in the current economy: These voters are among the most severely hurt by rising prices, and many are insecure about their finances and lack jobs with basic benefits. Nevertheless, many are optimistic about the future even as they express deep suspicion about government.
The new poll included interviews with 1,350 randomly selected workers 18 to 64 years old who put in at least 30 hours a week but earned $27,000 or less last year. As a group, they are somewhat less likely to be Republicans than all adults under age 65 and are also less likely to be registered to vote. As many call themselves conservatives as liberal, and nearly four in 10 said their views on most political matters are "moderate."
The group, which accounts for nearly a quarter of U.S. adults, gives the Democrat the nod both as the more empathetic candidate and as the one who more closely shares their values. And while many express no opinion about who would do more to improve the economy or health care -- or the voters' finances -- Obama has the clear edge among those who picked a favorite on these core issues.
Obama's standing with the white workers runs counter to an impression, dating from the primary season, that he struggles to attract support from that group. McCain advisers have said for months that they think the Republican can win a significant share of those voters because of Obama's performance in the spring.
The survey suggests it will be difficult, but not impossible, for McCain to increase his appeal. Whereas Obama underperforms congressional Democrats by six points among low-wage whites -- 53 percent would prefer that the party control Congress -- McCain has a seven-point edge over congressional Republicans.
Sixteen percent of the white workers polled chose neither Obama nor McCain, saying either that they have no opinion or that they support someone else or that they do not plan to vote.
Ruth Haskins, 64, the city clerk of Billings, Mo., said she is "scared about the younger generation running the country" and is solidly "on the fence" about the election.
In May, as the race between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton raged on, McCain adviser Charlie Black told reporters that the campaign would reach out to working-class white voters, in part because of Obama's difficulties wresting such voters from the Clinton camp.
"Senator Obama doesn't appear to have the ability to hold the traditional Democratic coalition together as well as Mrs. Clinton might," he said at the time.
In an interview last week, Black said the campaign still plans to target working-class white voters, particularly by appealing to them on economic and energy issues. Jobs and gasoline prices are "very big to people in that income range," Black said.
Nearly two-thirds of the white workers surveyed want the government to make lower gas prices a "top priority," something McCain pitched earlier this year in advocating for a suspension of the federal gas tax. One respondent was particularly clear on this point: "I'll vote for whoever can bring the price of gas down," said Brian Levesque, 25, a social worker from Lansdale, Pa.
But slightly more, seven in 10, say government should focus on helping people like them find more affordable health insurance, a core component of Obama's campaign. Just over four in 10 favor placing a top priority on tax cuts or on creating jobs through an expansion of public works projects.
Overall, the survey suggests that Obama's economic appeals have the most resonance with white workers who are under the greatest financial stress. He leads by 19 percentage points among those white workers who feel "very insecure" financially; that is more than double his advantage among those in the group who feel better off.
McCain leads among those who say they have advanced over the past seven years, but it is a much smaller group -- only 17 percent of low-wage white workers. Obama has the edge among those who say they have stayed about even over that time period.
An issue of acute importance to low-wage workers -- the impact of illegal immigration -- is one that divides workers in the poll about evenly: Forty-nine percent said illegal immigrants take jobs from legal residents, and 47 percent said they do not.
Nearly six in 10 white and black workers said they think undocumented workers take jobs away from those here legally; seven in 10 Hispanics disagreed. (Nearly half of the Hispanic workers interviewed in this poll are not U.S. citizens.)
International trade -- and its impact on increasingly scarce jobs -- is another issue that may prove a flash point for workers in the fall campaign.
Half of those polled said growth in trade has made things worse for the country; far fewer, only about two in 10, said it has had a net benefit, and a similar percentage said they are unsure. But a majority also said trade has not changed their lives one way or the other.
As is the case with immigration, majorities of white and black workers said trade has done more harm than good, while most Hispanics disagreed.
"One thing I keep seeing is a lack of wherewithal to tackle the tough issues like health care, illegal immigration," said Stephanie Dayton, 51, a bookkeeper in Tucson. "It's sort of like overhauling the tax code. If there was an easy way to tackle it without conflict, they would have done it already. At some point it takes some backbone to get it done. Get some backbone and decide what you stand for."
McCain's biggest challenge is among minority workers.
Among the African Americans polled, 92 percent chose Obama as the candidate more concerned with their problems; not a single black respondent said so about McCain, although 1 percent said "both do." Hispanics also sided with Obama on that question, favoring him by more than 40 percentage points as the more empathetic candidate.
The poll was conducted by conventional and cellular telephone June 18 to July 7, among a random national sample of low-wage workers. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. The results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.
Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta and assistant polling analyst Kyle Dropp contributed to this report.
Obama makes bid in 7 longtime Republican states
08/04/2008 @ 11:34 am
Filed by Associated Press
Alaska is young. Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia have growing populations and many black voters. Montana has seen recent Democratic inroads, and North Dakota has sent only Democrats to Congress since 1986. Indiana borders Barack Obama's home state.
The Democratic presidential candidate is putting money and manpower in all seven of these states - at levels unmatched by Republican rival John McCain.
For decades, these states have almost exclusively voted for Republican presidential candidates and have rarely seen any campaign action. Now, thanks in part to demographic and political shifts, they are emerging as new battlegrounds.
"We have the organizational ability and the financial ability to compete there," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said recently. "There is not a head fake among them."
Undeterred, senior McCain strategist Steve Schmidt said: "We feel very confident about holding these states." He also expressed optimism that McCain can win several Democratic-leaning perennial swing targets.
In the seven historically GOP bastions, Obama has run five weeks' worth of TV ads and dispatched dozens of workers to sign up legions of unregistered voters that his campaign believes can be persuaded to support the Illinois senator in droves if courted aggressively. Among their targets are blacks and young people, two constituencies that favor Obama but historically have been unreliable voters.
McCain is largely absent from most of these states, trusting for now that right-leaning roots will prevail.
Unlike McCain, Obama had a presence in all seven during the protracted Democratic primaries and that could benefit him.
But Republicans - and even some skeptical Democrats - claim Obama simply is trying to lure McCain into spending money defending GOP turf so he has less to compete with elsewhere.
Indeed, cash flow is a major factor; Obama expects to be able to afford to compete most anywhere while McCain must be more careful with his money because he is accepting public financing and the spending limits that come with it.
Democrats see other dynamics in the states as opportunities, which Republicans say are just delusions.
Of the cluster, Virginia is most likely to go Democratic, so it's the one where McCain is competing in earnest.
Obama is advertising statewide and has opened several offices. Putting Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine on the ticket could help.
McCain's headquarters is in northern Virginia, and he has a full paid Virginia campaign staff. So far, he's only on the air in the Washington, D.C., media market that serves the burgeoning Virginia suburbs.
That's the moderate region that has helped Democrats retain the governor's office and pick up one Senate seat.
Democrats say the growing numbers of young left-leaning professionals in the north and the state's large percentage of blacks - one in five - as well as untapped pools of potential voters make Virginia a ripe target for them. More than 4 million people are eligible to vote, but roughly a third are not registered, including a half-million blacks and several hundred thousand people age 18-24.
The situation is similar in two other fast-growing Southern states.
North Carolina has seen an influx of Northern retirees settling along the coast and in the mountains, while upper-class and academic transplants from all over flock to the booming economies of the high-tech Research Triangle and the Charlotte banking hub.
"You're definitely getting a new mix," said Bill Peaslee, a former state GOP chief of staff. "Some of the old givens are no longer true. It's not how it was 20 years ago or even 10 years ago."
Voter registrations are up, blacks are signing up in record numbers and a Democrat leads the state.
Recognizing a potential problem, McCain is sending a full paid staff to North Carolina though running no ads for now.
Georgia saw GOP gains in recent decades as conservatives moved in during a population spurt. It now has a Republican governor and legislature, and a strong state party organization.
Even so, Democrats see an opening among blacks who now make up 30 percent of Georgia's population. Even Republicans predict the first black major party presidential nominee will produce the largest black turnout ever.
Obama also is optimistic because the Libertarian Party candidate, former Republican Rep. Bob Barr, is from Georgia and could draw off conservative votes there.
In Indiana, Obama could benefit from his ties to the populous, heavily black northwest corner that's within Chicago's media market. He's also counting on backers in liberal-leaning university towns like South Bend and Bloomington. Choosing Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, a popular two-term governor, as his running mate would give Obama a boost.
"It can't be understated that he is from our neighboring state," said Dan Parker, the state Democratic Party chairman.
Since 1936, Democrats have won Indiana once in presidential elections, 1964. Still, they have had some success on the state level and ousted three GOP incumbent congressmen in 2006. Working-class Indiana whites pose hurdles for Obama as they did in his narrow primary loss to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Along the U.S.-Canada border, Democratic statewide victories have emboldened Obama to make plays for Montana and North Dakota. Republicans argue Democrats who win in those states are moderate and Obama is not. Obama's campaign also is counting on residual goodwill from his primary wins in both.
In Montana, Bill Clinton showed it's worth it for a Democrat to compete hard; he narrowly won it in 1992 but narrowly lost it four years later. President Bush, however, won by enormous margins in back-to-back elections.
Nevertheless, Democrats took the governor's office back with Gov. Brian Schweitzer's election in 2004 over a Republican, and booted a GOP senator facing corruption allegations two years later to take control of both Senate seats.
Democrats claim the electorate has become more moderate as new people settled in mountainous western Montana. Republicans argue the GOP foundation is strong and note that Montana has sent a Republican to the House since 1994.
North Dakota has a GOP governor but has had an all-Democratic congressional delegation for more than two decades. Still, no Democratic presidential candidate has won the state in more than 30 years.
Obama has opened offices in North Dakota's four largest cities and has visited twice since wrapping up the nomination.
"Barack Obama coming up here and competing here is going to force John McCain to make a choice," said Jamie Selzler, the state party director. "For everything that McCain does up here, that's a little bit less that he can do in these big battleground states we always hear about."
Even farther north in far-flung Alaska, it's been three decades since a Democratic nominee won the state.
Republicans dominate the levers of power, but corruption has rocked the party, including the latest black eye: the indictment of Sen. Ted Stevens this week.
All that turmoil emboldens Obama. So does the fact that Alaska is home to the nation's third-youngest population. Voter registrations among Democrats are outpacing Republicans.
Said state Sen. Hollis French, an Anchorage Democrat: "There is a real sense of energy coming off that campaign that is completely lacking from the other side."
Rerouting McCain's Bus
Frustrations Lead Campaign To Limit Reporters' Access
By Howard Kurtz
 John McCain's impromptu sessions with the press have become fewer and far between. |
| Photo Credit: By L.m. Otero -- Associated Press |
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 4, 2008; C01
KANSAS CITY While the traveling press corps was shipped off to a barbecue restaurant here, John McCain charmed his way through an interview with a local TV reporter. Surae Chinn of KCTV posed such less-than-penetrating questions as "How important is Missouri?" and "Have you chosen a running mate?" and -- addressing the candidate's wife, Cindy -- "How do you make your marriage work?"
Moments later, though, the Republican candidate seemed to grow annoyed with the Kansas City Star's Steve Kraske, who pressed him on his recent comment that "nothing is off the table" when it comes to strengthening Social Security.
When Kraske said that McCain presumably wasn't ruling out a payroll tax hike, McCain interrupted: "That's presuming wrong." When the reporter rephrased the question, McCain said: "If you want to keep asking me over and over again, you're welcome to."
It was a brief moment of friction that highlighted how the captain of the Straight Talk Express is having a bumpier ride with journalists than when he ran for president eight years ago. The popular image of the campaign -- McCain bantering with national journalists in the back of his bus -- has, in reality, all but vanished. The traveling press is now routinely stiffed in favor of five-minute sit-downs with local reporters.
At the same time, the Arizona senator is having trouble making news, or at least news that advances his campaign's goals, and when he does it is often reacting to the media hurricane that surrounds Barack Obama.
In 2000, when top news executives were clamoring for a chance to ride the fabled bus, McCain would spend hours talking to reporters who would write one story a day. "Now, with each bus trip, everyone's filing a blog report, every little thing is picked up and off it goes," says Slate correspondent John Dickerson. "It certainly takes him off message."
McCain is "pained" at all but ending the sessions, says spokeswoman Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush White House communications director, but "we have to find a balance. He won the primary essentially on a bus with the press. . . . He's intensely loyal to the back-and-forth with the press. It's who he is. It will always be part of our mix."
It wasn't part of the mix last week. National correspondents traveling with the candidate did not get to ask McCain a question for four days, and grew angry when a media availability was scheduled for late afternoon Friday in Panama City, Fla. -- too late to do them much good and requiring extra flights for those who had planned to head home for the weekend.
While the front of McCain's plane was reconfigured with a couch and two captain's chairs to allow for easy conversation, journalists say he has invited them up only once, on a trip to Colombia. On the ground, his availability is sometimes limited to a quick gaggle with a small group of pool reporters.
Obama doesn't mingle much with his press corps either -- he made an exception on his recent world tour -- but that has never been a core part of his strategy.
McCain is less engaging as a scripted candidate. But his strategists are convinced that the perpetual access was eroding their ability to drive a message, forcing the candidate to play on the media's turf by responding to flap-of-the-day questions, such as top adviser Carly Fiorina's lament that many health plans cover Viagra but not birth control.
But the aides say McCain would get hammered by the press if they restricted access even further, given his repeated insistence that such a move would destroy his credibility.
While many problems are of McCain's own making, it often seems that he can't catch a break. He stood beside an oil pump in a dusty Bakersfield, Calif., field last week, trying to dramatize his support for offshore drilling while painting Obama as "the Doctor No of America's energy future."
But the clip that played on ABC's "World News" and the cable networks was of McCain, who has a history of skin cancer, explaining to reporters why a mole had been removed from his face.
Republican strategists not affiliated with McCain say his campaign seems to lurch from one tactic to the next and has been largely devoid of new ideas that might draw sustained coverage.
"The McCain campaign's challenge in this Obama environment is to be consistent and drive a daily message for more than two days in a row," says Scott Reed, who managed the 1996 presidential campaign of another septuagenarian senator, Bob Dole.
Mark McKinnon, a McCain adviser who left the campaign after the primaries, says the media are "overhyping" Obama, but that things will even out by the fall.
Asked if McCain should spend so much time responding to Obama, thus letting him set the story line, McKinnon says: "It's hard not to react when there's this blazing comet across the sky."
If that has eclipsed the Republican's campaign, the staging of McCain's events hasn't helped. When Obama was in Israel, McCain was awkwardly chatting up shoppers in the cheese aisle of a Bethlehem, Pa., supermarket, where at one point several jars of applesauce came tumbling off a shelf. When Obama was drawing a huge crowd in Berlin, McCain was visiting Schmidt's Sausage Haus in Columbus, Ohio, placing an order of chocolate cream puffs to go.
Beyond the stagecraft, there is a sameness to McCain's schedule that works against breaking into the news cycle: town hall meeting, local interviews, fundraiser.
McCain is clearly energized by the town halls. In Racine, Wis., he was asked about taxes, college aid and whether Brett Favre should leave the Green Bay Packers. McCain's answers were crisp and forceful, but he said nothing he hasn't said dozens of times -- and therefore made no news.
Such generally friendly questions are now deemed preferable to responding to reporters. After touring a tractor factory Wednesday in Aurora, Colo., McCain kept walking when Associated Press correspondent Beth Fouhy shouted a question at him about the indictment of Republican Sen. Ted Stevens. The press corps had no chance to get a comment on his controversial ad likening Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.
On Thursday in Wisconsin, the reporters were itching to ask about the campaign's accusation that Obama was "playing the race card" by suggesting that McCain was trying to marginalize him as someone who didn't look like other presidents on dollar bills. When CNN's John King was interviewing the senator for a profile to run before the Republican convention -- and raised the race-card flap at the end -- aides tried to cut him off. McCain gave a 10-second answer and ended the interview with a quick handshake as King tried to follow up. The aides later chastised King for raising a subject that was not part of the agreed-upon agenda.
On the bus ride to the airport, four Milwaukee journalists were invited on the Straight Talk, in keeping with the new policy of generally reserving such trips for local reporters. This time, Fouhy asked the local AP scribe on that bus to question McCain about the race charge, and made sure the senator's defense of the charge hit the national wire.
During the subsequent flight to Orlando, McCain remained in the front cabin, which was cordoned off by a curtain. The only journalist ushered into his presence was a writer for Marie Claire magazine.
In the old days, reporters would have had hours to chew over the latest controversy, and plenty of other subjects, with McCain. But for a campaign struggling to regain control of its message, the old days are definitely gone.
Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."
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