Some national polls in the last two days have shown the race tightening a little bit, going from six or seven points to five or six points. It bears watching.
Four possible explanations:
1. The "he's a socialist" line is gaining traction. This is the most worrisome explanation, because Obama isn't really answering it. He will have one more chance to do so on a big scale, that 30 minutes of prime-time television he bought on October 29. But two-plus weeks of being called a "socialist" isn't a good thing in this country.
2. As a result of the third debate, McCain has managed to get some distance from Bush, i.e., with that line about how if Obama wanted to run against Bush he should have run four years ago. CNN's Bill Schneider cites this as the reason.
3. Nate Silver, writing on Saturday, said that maybe McCain has gotten more GOP base voters to come back to the fold with more enthusiasm in recent days:
Between "Joe the Plumber", "spread the wealth", "I'm not George Bush", etc., however, McCain at least now seems to have a few somewhat more constructive talking points (in that sense, the fact that the Ayers attacks went over like a lead balloon at the debate might have done him a favor). So some of those crestfallen conservatives might have moved back into the likely voter universe.What I don't know that McCain is doing, on the other hand, is actually persuading very many voters, and particularly not independents or registered Democrats. If that is the case, than McCain is likely to run into something of a wall very soon here, brought about the Republicans' substantial disadvantage in partisan identification.
Obviously, this is a comparatively non-worrisome explanation.
4. Races just tighten toward the end for reasons we don't know. They almost always do.
One thing to remember here I suppose is that we elect presidents by state, so at this point it's really state polls that matter. It's possible that national poll numbers are skewed by more enthusiasm among Republicans in deep-red states. That'll help McCain's national numbers, but if it's actually reflective of increased enthusiasm in Idaho and Oklahoma and Texas and so on, it doesn't matter electorally.
I'd say watch the polling especially closely in Virginia, Colorado and a few other states over the next few days. Those are two states Obama needs. If he holds the Kerry states and wins those two, plus Iowa and New Mexico, where he seems to be comfortably ahead, he's won. Actually he wins numerically with either Virginia or Colorado in that scenario, but a little cushion doesn't hurt.
