Two Stories

There were two big stories today that everyone has probably heard by now. Early this morning, the Obama campaign announced a HUGE fundraising haul in September of over $150 million. A few hours later, Colin Powell endorsed Obama on Meet the Press. Let's look at the potential impact of each of these in turn.

To put the $150 million in perspective, the previous one-month fundraising record--set by Obama in August--was $66 million. With his total fundraising exceeding $600 million, Politico notes that he's on track to surpass the combined fundraising of Bush and Kerry in 2004. (This entry will probably refer to Politico more than usual, since I'm watching the Sox game on DVR and don't want to spoil it by accidentally seeing a score report on a mainstream news website.) This is what has allowed Obama to dramatically outspend McCain on advertising, including a half-hour of airtime on CBS and NBC on October 29th.

So the actual haul is nothing but good news for Obama. But my question is, what impact will the announcement of this amount have? There are three perspectives on this. It could have a positive effect, since it could add to Obama's perceived inevitably and serve to further discourage McCain supporters. It could have no effect, since the vast majority of Americans don't care about campaign financing. (And as a certain political type I know pointed out to me tonight, the vast majority of people also have no real idea how the campaign finance system works anyway.) My take, though, is that there's potential for this story to hurt Obama. For one, it allows McCain to bring up the argument again that Obama lied by saying he would take public financing and then backing out of it. And as far as negative attacks go, that may be the most substance-based McCain has going for him, so he may be able to spin it effectively. What's more, the people who are still undecided right now may be the same people who are most likely to react negatively to the announcement. You could imagine that the people who are still uncommitted are the lesser-of-evils types who generally dislike politicians and are unlikely to be fans of large amounts of money in politics. This announcement could turn them away from Obama. While this is admittedly speculative, there is some evidence for this. Looking at the Harris poll linked to above, the people who are most likely to respond negatively to a generic candidate opting-out of public financing are independents--who are also the most likely to still be undecided.

I can't say whether this will make much of a difference, but I think the worry about it was what caused the campaign to announce that number early on a Sunday morning when the main news story was inevitably the potential Powell announcement. A smart move, I think, since the money story gets buried under the Powell story, and because it's too late for Sunday's papers it gets stale by the time Monday rolls around. Any potential damage is largely blunted by the timing, while the people it might help with (the overinformed partisan types--which I suspect includes most of us) will hear about it regardless.

As far as the Powell announcement goes, the prevailing wisdom ranges from "so what?" to modestly good news for Obama. Endorsements typically don't change any minds directly, but (a) Colin Powell is not a normal endorser, with high favorability ratings from both Republicans and Democrats, and (b) in the big picture sense, it wins a good news cycle or two for Obama, takes McCain out of the headlines for that time (taking away his chances to make news), and may help to shore up Obama's foreign policy credentials. My take is that it will probably not have a perceivable impact on the polling numbers, but what it will do is shore up some of the weak Obama supporters (by allaying their doubts about him) while decreasing the likelihood of some weak McCain supporters turning out. So while I don't think it'll affect the polls, I'd bet it's worth half a point or so on election day--and if you don't think that's a lot, remember Florida in 2000.