This, from Politico's Roger Simon, is just silly:
I was talking the other day to a prominent Republican who asked me what I thought John McCain's strongest issues would be in the general election.
Lower taxes and the argument he will be better able to protect America from its enemies, I said.Republicans have a pretty good track record with those two.
The Republican shook his head. "You're missing the most important one," he said. "Race. McCain runs against Barack Obama and the race vote is worth maybe 15 percent to McCain."
First off, as Steve Benen notes here, the most recent polling on this question puts the number at closer to 8%. There's plenty of evidence - both from polling data and from political science research - to suggest that the 15% statistic was correct back in the 1980s, but there's virtually nothing that suggests it still holds true today. Simon does briefly acknowledge that fact, but he quickly dismisses it as unreliable, suggesting based on a single anecdote that the 15% number may actually be too low. I mean, who knows? And as the Chief Political Columnist of Politico, who is he to say? Why bother with research and fact gathering when rumor and speculation are so much easier to produce?
Second, unless you know something about the people who make up this mythical 15%, the statistic is utterly meaningless. Is Simon's source suggesting that Obama has to open up a 16% lead in polling to actually win by 1% in November? Surely not. But if not, then what? Is he saying that there's 15% of the public Obama could never reach? Perhaps. But if that 15% is part of the 30% that make up the Republican base, it doesn't matter. And that's the point - without knowing some of the other characteristics of this group, we can't know anything about the kind of impact they are likely to have.
Simon writes as if this question is some great unknowable, beyond the reach of facts and careful analysis. But of course it is not. We have months and months of national polling data he could pour over, just as we have the results of primaries and exit polls from a sizable majority of the states. If Simon isn't up to the task of analyzing it himself, surely he could find an intern or a political scientist with the appropriate skills and ask them to do it on his behalf.
This isn't rocket science, people. Or at least it shouldn't be....
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