The Atlantic’s Ambinder: “The Next Steps for John McCain”
Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic does his usual fine job of keeping us posted on what’s going on. While all of us McCain supporters are still celebrating Senator McCain’s magnificent victory in the Granite State, Ambinder has the key info on how McCain can parlay his big win into nomination-nabbing momentum. Here’s his post, titled “The Next Steps for John McCain”:
First, he has to raise money.
John McCain’s presidential campaign is virtually broke, raising and spending about $25,000 a day. To do that, he will turn to a cadre of big-name fundraisers recruited way back when the campaign was projecting $120M budgets and renting high-class office space in Los Angeles.
Then he has to win Michigan — an accomplishable task, although he needs to play tournament-quality politics.
Then he has to add staff — lots of them. The campaign proudly runs on well-worn shoes, but the 22 contests on February 5 are not congenial to politicians with special retail politics skills. McCain has no absentee ballot program to speak of in Florida; Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney hope to bank thousands by the day of the election.
Then he has to figure out how to build momentum in Feb. 5. A win in South Carolina is possible, providing that Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson split the votes of mainline conservatives. Rudy Giuliani is superficially strong in Florida now, but there is no evidence that an accumulation of victories by McCain could erase, almost overnight, the modest groundwork that Giuliani is building in the state.
Illinois and California are McCain’s top Feb. 5 targets. New York and New Jersey give all their delegates to the winner, and there’s no reason to spend millions to try and soften Rudy Giuliani’s home state and adopted state support.
My take:
I’d like to note that this was a great post, chock-full of the nuts-and-bolts campaign news that we saw throughout 2007. Obviously, this sort of info has taken a back seat to Iowa and NH and horse-race coverage. But this remains more relevant than ever, and so I found it very informative…
I understand that they were taking all of their cash and betting it on NH, a strategy with which I completely agreed. It stands to reason that there is not much left in the till. However, I would speculate that the victory last night in NH probably will open the floodgates in terms of online fundraising. I find it particularly impressive that the campaign ultimately did not need to tap into federal matching funds, with the tight spending caps they would have imposed on a state-by-state basis.
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