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Sunday, Oct. 05, 2008

Economic turmoil shifts campaign

NEW YORK — The turmoil on Wall Street and the weakening economy are changing the contours of the presidential campaign map, giving new force to Sen. Barack Obama's ambitious strategy to make incursions into Republican territory, while leading Sen. John McCain to scale back his efforts to capture Democratic-leaning states.

Obama has what both sides describe as serious efforts under way in at least nine states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including some that neither side once thought would be on the table this close to Election Day. In a visible sign of the breadth of Obama's aspirations, he is using North Carolina — a state that Bush won by 13 percentage points in 2004, and where Obama is now spending heavily on advertisements — as his base for debate preparations this weekend.

By contrast, McCain is competing in just four states where Democrats won in 2004: Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Minnesota. His decision last week to pull out of Michigan reflected in part the challenge that the declining economy has created for Republicans, given that they have held the White House for the last eight years.

But McCain's abrupt decision also underlined the tactical political squeeze he finds himself in: With Obama using his fund-raising advantage to compete in so many places, he has forced McCain to spend money to hold on in what had been viewed as safe Republican states, such as Missouri and Indiana, while limiting McCain's ability to play offense on Democratic turf.

Obama now has a solid lead in states that account for 189 electoral votes, and he is well-positioned in states representing 71 more electoral votes, for a total of 260, according to a tally by The New York Times, based on polls and interviews with officials from both campaigns and outside analysts. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.

McCain has solid leads in states with 160 electoral votes, and is well-positioned in states with another 40 electoral votes, for a total of 200. Just six states representing 78 electoral votes — Florida, Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire, Nevada and Colorado — are considered tossups.

Obama appears to have significantly more options to reach the 270 threshold, particularly if McCain fails to win any states that Democrats won in 2004, such as Pennsylvania, where the Republican ticket has been competing especially vigorously.

That said, the margin in many of these states remains relatively tight, and the field could certainly shift again in the final weeks, as the presidential candidates engage in two more debates and as McCain steps up his attacks on Obama, as his aides said he plans to do.

McCain's advisers said their hope was that the issue of the economy would recede somewhat from the public consciousness, now that Congress has passed a bailout plan, and open the way to try to turn the contest back into a referendum on Obama's credentials. They argued that given everything that has happened, McCain still remains in easy distance of Obama, evidence of what they said were underlying problems with his appeal.

Obama in particular is moving to seize on what both sides think could be a decisive moment in this campaign, using Wall Street as a way to focus attention on related concerns, such as Social Security and health care.

Obama is now running advertisements aimed at elderly voters in South Florida and Las Vegas and Reno, Nev., invoking the Wall Street crisis in criticizing McCain's support for allowing individuals to choose to invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds as an alternative to Social Security. The advertisements assert that the approach will "gamble with your life savings." (That claim has been described by independent monitoring organizations as deceptive.)

In Florida, voters will begin receiving mailings from Obama on Monday warning about what they describe as a McCain plan to tax health care benefits "for the first time ever." A new advertisement released Friday, using clips from Thursday night's vice presidential debate, makes the same attack on McCain. In Nevada, advertisements are geared toward the mortgage crisis in a state that has among the highest foreclosure rates.

In Virginia, voters stung by fuel costs received brochures from Obama's campaign saying, "While you're running on empty, Exxon made $4 billion in one month."

It is health care, Obama advisers said, that they think resonates more than other issues for Americans who are worried about their economic condition. It is a less-threatening way to talk about the economy — showing pictures of shuttered banks, for example, could create more worry — that aides said tested particularly well among older voters who have been slower to warm to Obama.

"One of the biggest economic anxieties that people have is the cost of health care," said Gov. James E. Doyle of Wisconsin, a Democrat in a state where McCain is making a strong challenge to Obama. "There is a great deal of uneasiness."

McCain's advisers said that more than anything, it was the bad economy in Michigan — staggered by declining sales of American-made automobiles — that convinced them they had no hope of winning a state that once had been high on their list of targets. Beyond that, they said the Wall Street downturn was hurting McCain in Florida — where the mortgage crisis has been particularly acute — a state where they were once confident they could hold off Obama.