McCain camp claims momentum favors comeback

Senior Republican officials said Friday that GOP presidential candidate John McCain is surging in internal polls, and they believe he has the momentum to stage a comeback over Democrat Barack Obama. 

Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, told reporters on a conference call that the campaign believes it has “shaken off the effects of the financial collapse” that stunted Sen. McCain (Ariz.) and running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s momentum coming out of the convention.

{mosads}Davis said the campaign is seeing the best 10 days of polling since the bump McCain enjoyed from the tandem of a successful GOP convention and the pick of Palin, which energized the base.

Surprisingly, Davis noted that the campaign’s internal polling shows a dead heat in Iowa. Almost every poll shows Obama leading by double digits in the Hawkeye State, where the Illinois Democrat shook the political world with a big win in the first-in-the-nation caucuses.

Obama is returning to the state before Election Day, leading Davis to make the case that the Democrat’s polling probably mirrors McCain's. The RealClearPolitics average of polls in the state shows Obama with an 11-point lead.

Bill McInturff, McCain's lead pollster, said on the call that recent polling shows Republicans, independents and conservative Democrats exhibiting intensity for McCain that “we’ve never recorded before.”

McInturff said public polling showing Obama with landslide-proportion leads are using flawed samples, with self-identified Democrats comprising far too much of the respondents.

“That’s just not America, and it’s not America in the last generation and a half,” he said.

McInturff adjusted his overall turnout projection, which was 130 million votes early in the week, to say it could now go as high as 135 million. The Obama campaign said earlier Friday it thinks that number is low.

McCain’s political director, Mike DuHaime, said the campaign is enjoying a technological advantage over Democrats, and it is making its target numbers of voter contacts.

DuHaime added that the campaign, through volunteers, contacted 5.3 million voters in the last week for a total 23 million voter contacts. By comparison, DuHaime said, during the same week in 2004, the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) contacted 1.9 million voters.

DuHaime stated that staff and volunteers made 1.3 million contacts — phone calls and knocks on doors — on Thursday alone, and he anticipates at least 17 million more contacts before Tuesday.

Another surprise revelation was Davis's belief that the McCain campaign and the RNC will outspend Obama and the Democratic National Committee in television advertising before the end of the campaign.

Davis dismissed any impact that Obama’s 30-minute “infomercial” Wednesday night might have had on undecided voters.

“We don’t see any evidence that that was any kind of a game-changer or did anything other than communicate with their base,” Davis said.