When the McCain campaign made it known in the waning days of the campaign that they intended to focus much of their attention on Pennsylvania, eyebrows were raised. Given Obama's double digit lead in the state, and so little runway remaining, how was this a winning strategy? Well, perhaps winning was never its objective.
Over at fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver has a post describing how Obama's popular vote cushion in the states he won was so large, even if he'd suddenly faded and lost the overall popular vote by a sizable margin he still would have seized an electoral victory. So McCain trying to pick off a state like Pennsylvania, rather than others where with a closer margin, was basically pointless:
In other words, if you had subtracted 9.3 points from Barack Obama's margin in every state, he would still have tied the Electoral College -- even while losing the popular vote by almost 3 points. And if you had subtracted 8.6 points, he would have won the Electoral College outright, while losing the popular vote by 2.1 points. McCain's strategy of in effect conceding Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, while trying to compete in states like Pennsylvania and Iowa where Obama was already comfortably over 50 percent in almost all pre-election polls, was in retrospect a complete disaster.
So why did they pursue this approach? Newsweek's "Secrets of the 2008 Campaign" might offer a clue:
On Oct. 12, the Sunday night before the last debate, McCain's core group of advisers—Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, adman Fred Davis, strategist Greg Strimple, pollster Bill McInturff and strategy director Sarah Simmons—met to review the state of the campaign. The polling numbers were grim. The question on the table was whether it was time to call on McCain and tell him it was over, that he no longer had a chance to win. The consensus in the room was no, not yet, not while he still had a "pulse."
If the campaign brass had already concluded that "it was over," but didn't want to tell the candidate, then one wonders if a rationale -- perhaps the main rationale -- for the sudden focus on Pennsylvania was simply to keep McCain busy. Give him something to focus on. As others have noted, thin but at least marginally viable arguments could be made for targeting Pennsylvania. It seems plausible that a campaign professional such as Steve Schmidt never really believed them, but used the Pennsylvania gambit to keep his candidate optimistic -- and occupied until election day.