A few weeks back we updated you about the overwhelming advantage Barack Obama has over John McCain where their respective ground games are concerned. 24 days from the 2008 Presidential Election, it appears that one camp is surging forward while another is all but giving up.
Fivethirtyeight.com, the premier election prediction site in the United States, has posted the following update regarding the Obama and McCain ground games in Red bastion Miami County - where, strangely enough, I lived during the Summer of 1997 (I lived in West Milton):
The first thing that stands out about the Troy, Ohio Obama field office is its placement. It's right in the heart of town. It catches everyone's attention -- you can't miss it.
The next thing that caught our attention was that, since the office had first opened, 800 different people from Miami County had come through the office's doors to volunteer. There were only 51,760 voters in the entire county in 2004, and a mere 17,606 were Kerry voters.
4.5% of the entire Miami County Kerry vote has already walked in the doors to volunteer.
Compare that to McCain's presence and operation in the same area via Troy, OH:
We tried to go to the McCain office just down the street in Troy at noon on Saturday. At the exact moment we arrived, we found two nice elderly women peering inside the locked, closed office. They'd come to volunteer. Unfortunately, McCain's Troy office isn't open on weekends, according to a sign in the window.
24 days til the election.
*Source: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/...
What makes this development so stunning is the fact that Ohio is a bona fide battleground state. The arrogant manner by which McCain has ignored my state, Indiana, is somewhat predictable given its traditional deep Red history (although his indifference with regards to The Hoosier State may cost McCain on November 4). But Ohio is a state that has polled either dead even or slightly ahead for Obama. George Bush barely carried this state in 2004 - and that was during an election year when the economy wasn't in peril and the War in Iraq was still relatively popular.
Obama's strategy here is brilliant, yet the definition of simplicity. He has dedicated himself to pulling 5,000 votes here, 4,000 votes there from traditionally Red areas of states like Ohio - while suffocating McCain in his strongholds via increased registration totals in areas that he thrives in i.e. college towns and urban population centers. It is almost as if he is Joshua battling the city of Jericho - which was also heavily fortified by the opposition. Obama's ground game is causing the walls to crumble in battleground states - including Ohio.
http://democratictribune.com/...