Demagogue

A new poll today has Obama maintaining a 13% advantage in PA. But polls are just polls. However, looking at the raw registered voter numbers, I'm not sure why McCain's camp think that they can change PA from blue to red.

In 2004 Kerry won PA by a small margin-- by 143,000 votes-- BUT dems did not have a 1.1 million registered voter advantage.

PA in 2008:
Registered Dems: 4,060,647
Registered GOP: 2,917,747
Registered Indepedents: 869,707

PA in 2004:
Kerry: 2,938,095 (registered dems: 3.9 million)
Bush: 2,793,847 (registered gop: 3.4 million)
Statewide average voter turnout: 62%

For McCain to win PA he'd have to get ALL the independents AND over 20% of registered dems. Voting turnout is expected to be high, Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) alone is predicting an 85% turnout. Between 2004 and 2008 dems gained 500,000 registered votes and the GOP lost 200,000 voters.

So we'll see what actually happens on November 4th, although there are over a million reasons in PA alone to be pretty optimistic.