Washington — Washington - Midway through the fall campaign, the landscape of the presidential election is tilting even more in Barack Obama's direction.
A variety of national polls show Obama with a significant lead that may have begun to stabilize. He held an eight percentage-point advantage over John McCain in the latest Gallup Daily Tracking poll, 50 percent to 42 percent, exactly the same as last weekend.
With the U.S. economy rapidly weakening, McCain recently pulled staff and TV ads out of Michigan, a large, Democratic-leaning state where he had tried and failed to keep Obama pinned down. Instead, McCain is spending additional money and time in places where Democrats usually don't stand a chance but that are up for grabs this year.
Still, the presidential race remains relatively close, the election is more than a month away and McCain has bounced back repeatedly during the course of his campaign.
The changes in the '08 contest come in the middle of presidential and vice-presidential debate season, often regarded as pivotal in close elections. But the latest shifts appear to be tied less to those events than to the economic turmoil that has shaken many voters. The public has increasingly turned its attention to rising job losses and a credit crisis that threatens to deepen what the vast majority of Americans already regard as a recession.
Those worries have hurt McCain, analysts say, and produced political benefits for Obama as the candidate whose party doesn't control the White House. Voters tell pollsters they think Obama would do a better job dealing with the economy, an issue that typically helps Democrats, even in better times.
Republican strategists say McCain's most urgent task is to reframe the election in a way that would minimize the impact of the economy on the Nov. 4 vote. "If it's about the black cloud of the economy and the Bush administration that's hanging over McCain's head, he's going to lose," said Scott Reed, a Republican consultant and McCain supporter.
Now that Congress has passed a financial bailout package and left town to campaign for its own re-election, this is "the perfect opportunity for McCain to pivot back to Obama," Reed added. "McCain needs to reintroduce the idea that the race is about Obama and his liberal record and his tax-and-spend history and make it a referendum on Obama."
