When Republican John McCain’s campaign yanked down its TV ads in Michigan and ceded the state to the enemy last week, the move was the latest sign of a shift toward Democrat Barack Obama in the battleground states likely to decide the election.

With the Wall Street crisis magnifying economic anxieties, polls in those states show Obama in a commanding position, giving him more targets than McCain to assemble the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

With a month until the election, the campaigns are focusing on eight to 12 competitive states, most of which President Bush won in 2004.

“In the last two weeks or so the numbers have moved even more sharply to Obama,” said pollster Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who co-founded the Web site pollster.com.

“It’s volatile – I’d say it’s going Obama’s way but this election is way, way close,” Franklin said.

Polls show Obama competitive or leading in 10 states that went red in 2004: Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Missouri, as well as Indiana and Virgina, two states which have not gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.

Even if Obama ultimately loses some of them, his campaign has more cash and can force McCain to play defense in usually Republican states such as Indiana where Obama is making a push.

McCain’s options appear narrower. Aides say that his best remaining chances to pick up a blue state are in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. McCain aides said late last week they would step up efforts in Pennsylvania, whose 21 electoral votes would make up for the 17 they’re conceding in Michigan.

After a summer of attacks on Obama and the Republican convention in early September, it was McCain who was gaining ground, even surpassing Obama in some national polls, and Democrats were worried. But the latest Obama trend is yet another reversal of fortune in a presidential race with more twists than a spy film.

Now, both campaigns are watching poll numbers and continually recalibrating where to spend their time, money and muscle in hopes of stringing together the right combination of states. The battleground map could change yet again.

“Right now Obama is ahead in all the swing states pretty much,” said Nate Silver, a statistician who founded Fivethirtyeight.com, a Website named for the total number of electoral votes and devoted to making projections. “If he wins the second tier, traditionally Republican states like North Carolina and Missouri, that would be kind of the cherry on his sundae,” Silver said.

Silver’s site uses an algorithm that combines polls, voter registration trends and election returns to project how each state would perform. If the election were held now, he said, Obama would likely win decisively with 325 to 375 electoral votes.

“There’s always a point, sometimes in the summer and sometimes on election eve, when the electorate breaks one way or another,” Silver said. “It’s possible that the electorate broke, that the McCain campaign might not control its destiny. They might need some event, maybe an international event, or for Obama to make a gaffe.”

For most of the summer, McCain advisers considered Michigan, with 17 electoral votes, as one of their best chances to flip a swing state from Democratic blue to Republican red on the electoral map.

Many white blue-collar voters have been skeptical of Obama; there was general dissatisfaction with the state’s Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, and McCain himself had won the state’s GOP primary in 2000.

But when the credit meltdown hit, McCain faded and Obama’s lead grew in the Wolverine State. Recent polls found Michiganders trusted Obama more on the economy, an important advantage in a hard-hit state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 8.9 percent.

“The economy here is the overwhelming issue – we’ve been in the tank for seven or eight years and the Wall Street mess just exacerbates all the economic pain,” said Bill Ballenger, an independent analyst who publishes Inside Michigan Politics. “It was a miracle he 1/8McCain 3/8 was doing as well as he was here.”

McCain advisers sought to downplay the retreat from Michigan, noting that the Obama campaign had scaled back its effort to win red states such as Georgia and North Dakota.

“This is going to happen when you get down near the end,” former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Friday.

McCain political director Mike DuHaime said that the Michigan staff and budget would be shifted to other states that were blue in 2004. In addition to Pennsylvania, he mentioned Wisconsin, with 10 electoral votes; and Maine, which splits its 4 electoral votes proportionally instead of awarding them to the statewide winner.

Senior McCain adviser Greg Strimple said that Michigan always was a reach, “the worst state of all the states 1/8for us 3/8 that are in play. It’s an obvious one … to come off the list.”

But David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, said the pullout was a momentous development. “Their narrow path got narrower,” he told reporters Thursday. “We’ve been playing a lot more offense than McCain has.”

Pennsylvania is a ripe target because Obama has had “problems there all year,” DuHaime said during a conference call Thursday with reporters. He was referring to Obama’s loss to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the state’s Democratic primary, in part because he had difficulty connected with white blue-collar voters.

Though the primary focus in Pennsylvania will be “suburban women and independents,” senior adviser Greg Strimple said, “our polling shows a considerable portion of Democrats outside the Philadelphia media market” is up for grabs.

Public polls, however, have been picking up some movement toward Obama in Pennsylvania as well. Before the Wall Street crisis and the Sept. 26 presidential debate, Obama was leading in Pennsylvania 49 to 43 percent, according to Quinnipiac University. In post debate samplings released last week, voters favored the Democrat by 54 to 39 percent, the poll found.

And a Franklin & Marshall College poll released Wednesday showed Obama up in the Keystone State 45 percent to 38 percent. That was up slightly from the college’s August poll, and Obama has made gains among white working-class voters, the survey found.

“The trend lines are all moving in such a way that it’s a rough road for John McCain,” said F&M pollster G. Terry Madonna. “He needs a breakthrough moment, but it is hard to see what could change the dynamic.”

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(c) 2008, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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