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The Obama campaign will be opening a staffed field office in Anchorage and may be planning a campaign visit to Alaska by the end of the summer. The McCain campaign has no immediate plans to open an office or to hire staff, choosing instead to deny that Alaska is all that close --- a risky proposition given that Rasmussen showed the general election there within four points. But what I found most interesting about the article in the Anchorage Daily was this paragraph: Obama's national campaign manager, David Plouffe [...] said Obama is looking for multiple paths to victory and that could include mounting intensive precinct efforts in small-population states where McCain has fewer resources to compete, such as Alaska, according to McClatchy Newspapers.
This is the strategy that carried the Obama campaign to victory in the primaries. Facing a candidate with greater name recognition but possessing itself a broad and enthusiastic volunteer base, the campaign competed in the pundit-proclaimed Big States, but its greatest successes were in small-state caucuses and primaries that the Clinton campaign largely ignored. The Clinton campaign assumed that Clinton's national poll numbers would ensure at least a passable showing across the February 5th primaries and caucuses. And the morning after the results came in, maybe they even woke up feeling like they'd won. But the losses in caucuses in places like Kansas had been devastating. Could this strategy work in the general election? Obama is again matched with an opponent who believes they can coast through the general election without intensive field work in several states. But the main problem is that the general election isn't proportional. There's no delegate prize for coming in second. Coming close in Alaska will win them nothing. The strategy also relies on McCain being unable to call their bluff, so to speak. Ultimately, given the resources advantage, it's worth a shot. And it might just give Democrats the needed help in the House and Senate races there.
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