Obama's Last-Ditch Strategy

    The Daily Beast - Tue Oct 26, 12:26 am ET

Obama's Last-Ditch Strategy With the GOP riding high, the White House seeks solace in tight Senate races and the undecided vote. Richard Wolffe on Team Obama's final midterm moves and the wedge issues they'll push next year. Plus, midterm predictions from the Election Oracle.

With one week left before the midterm elections, Obama's senior advisers can now see the contours of a landscape they all concede is vastly different from the one they traversed just two years ago.

But the news, they insist, is not all bad. Despite widespread predictions of a Republican blowout, Obama's team claims that early voting data and the latest polling shows hills as well as valleys. "It's not consistent," said one senior Obama aide. "In places where we have a strong turnout operation, we'll do OK and better than expected. Pennsylvania, Ohio and even Illinois is improving. In other places, where the turnout operation is weak, we're in trouble."

"Many of the House districts," the aide said, as a matter of fact.

Sure enough, in Senate races across the country, the contests have grown closer in these final weeks. In Colorado, the recently appointed Senator Michael Bennet has closed a high single-digit deficit against Republican Ken Buck to turn the race into a technical dead heat. In Pennsylvania, Democrat Joe Sestak has done something similar to cut his deficit against Republican Pat Toomey.

But elsewhere, the trend seems to be running in the other direction. In Obama's home state of Illinois, his friend Alexi Giannoulias is struggling to close a small but consistent gap against Republican Mark Kirk. That race, like so many others, remains well within the polls' margin of error.

So it's no surprise that President Obama's final campaign swing next weekend takes in Philadelphia and Chicago. What's less expected: He's ending his tour in Cleveland, where Democrats hope a strong late showing by Governor Ted Strickland could help tip the balance in a handful of House races in a battleground state that continues to tilt toward the GOP.

In searching for hopeful signs on a bleak horizon, Obama's team also points to surveys showing a huge portion of the voting population that remains undecided. According to a recent Associated Press poll, as many as one third of likely voters are undecided and say they could change their mind. Of those persuadable voters, 45 percent favor Republicans versus 38 percent who favor Democrats. Two years ago, just 14 percent of voters were undecided at this point, according to another Associated Press poll....