The Betfair Prof / Leighton Vaughan Williams / 03 November 2008 /

How can John McCain beat Barack Obama in today's Presidential Election? Completing the 'straight' is his only option, says Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams...

You're sitting at the poker table, holding the 2, 3, 5 and 6. There's one card left to draw from the pack. You need a 4 to complete an 'inside straight'. Spades, clubs, hearts or diamonds, you don't mind, as long as it's a 4. What are your chances?

About the same as John McCain winning this election, according to the latest Betfair odds. In fact, his current likelihood of winning, according to the market, is about 8%, or a shade less than the chance of getting that elusive 'inside straight'.

So where does McCain get the 8% from?

After all, he's down, according to the latest polling averages, in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa and New Mexico, all of which Bush won in 2004. North Carolina, another Bush state, is also in peril, as to a lesser extent would seem to be Indiana, Montana, Georgia and even McCain's home state of Arizona.

Meanwhile, Obama is leading in the polls by comfortable digits in every state that John Kerry won in 2004.

So what is the McCain strategy?

It comes down to holding all the states where he is down by a bit (Florida, Virginia, Ohio), taking Pennsylvania out of the 'blue' (Democrat) column and winning one of the smaller states where he currently lags by a wider margin (perhaps Nevada, Colorado or even New Hampshire).

So the bottom line, it seems to me, is Pennsylvania. This is the 'inside straight' strategy. The current polling average puts him down 7.6 percent down in this fount of electoral votes, and the very latest poll, a Quinnipiac survey with a large sample puts him down 10 points. Still, this is the sort of state where he can hope to appeal to conservative Democrat blue-collar male white voters, and in swinging this wedge of the electorate lies his last best hope.

This 'Pennsylvania strategy's makes up part of the 8%.

The second glimmer of hope is that some external event (perhaps a terrorist outrage) will occur in the dying hours of the campaign to drive security-concerned voters into the arms of the Vietnam veteran.

Then there is the so-called 'Bradley' effect, named after the black mayor of Los Angeles who lost the Governorship of California despite the polls showing him well up. In other words, it is the hope that a block of voters who have been telling pollsters they will vote for the African American candidate will, in the privacy of the voting booth, pull the lever for the white man.

The problem with the first line of hope is that Pennsylvania doesn't seem to be tightening up in the closing hours (for example, a Rasmussen poll published yesterday showed McCain down 6, compared to a 4-point deficit in the same poll a few days earlier).

Time is ticking down fast for the second line of hope. Finally, there has been scant evidence of a Bradley effect (if it ever really existed) for some years now.

Do these strands of hope add up to an 8 percent probability of winning? Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way, John McCain will want to turn over that last card.

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