Did McCain Quit in the Wrong State? - Pennsylvania Sliding Quickly Toward Barack Obama

Recently the McCain campaign made a strategic decision to pull out of the state of Michigan. It had once been the campaign's number one pickup possibility, but they believed that the state was moving in the other direction quickly and that there return on investment possibilities were very low in the state. The average of the most recent polls in the state of Michigan show Barack Obama with a solid, but not insurmountable lead of 7%.

At the time they conceded the state of Michigan there is no doubt that the stakes got that much higher in the state of Pennsylvania. It is a state that has gone democratic in the last few elections, but the margin has been quite narrow in the last couple of general elections. It is also a state with 21 very critical electoral votes. The McCain campaign has invested heavily in the state of Pennsylvania for months and had high hopes for the state because of Hillary Clinton's appeal to the state's voters, and Barack Obama's relative lack of appeal in the primary.

If the McCain campaign was hoping for Pennsylvania to be the answer to their electoral problems recent polling indicates that it better look somewhere else, and quickly. The last four polls released from the state of Pennsylvania all show Barack Obama leading John McCain by at least 10 points. The RealClearPolitics average of the five most recent polls in the state show Barack Obama leading by 12%. Certainly a lot of things can change quickly in an election, but there is no doubt that 12% is a huge amount to try to make up in the period of just 28 days.

In several news reports the McCain campaign is reported to have said that part of the reason they pulled their advertisements in Michigan is that the state is quite expensive to advertise in. I have to wonder how the campaign is going to continue to spend huge amounts of money in Pennsylvania, specifically the all-important suburbs of Philadelphia, when the polls are looking this bad for them. No doubt that television advertising in the Philadelphia market is extremely expensive.