There were many Philly precincts, in white, blue-collar neighborhoods, like south Philly and Northeast Philly, Fishtown and Kensington, where Hillary creamed Obama in the primaries. Those are places, the NY Times reports, where Obama is at risk.
John Kerry won Philly by 412,000 votes-- 80% of the vote. But he won the state by just 144,000.
McCain has been spending enormous amounts of time in and around Philly, and he's sent Sarah Palin to the more "Alabama" part of Pennsylvania.
The hope is they'll pull the Hillary voters in precincts Hillary took eight or ten to one, the NY Times says:
As the Republicans try to map out ways in which Mr. McCain could pull off an upset, they see fertile ground in some enclaves in Philadelphia that are mostly white. They said that these areas would not yield a big trove of votes but that trimming Mr. Obama’s lead here might make a difference.
“I’m spending a lot of time in Philadelphia,” said Robert Gleason, the chairman of the state Republican Party.
“We’re working the Northeast,” he said, referring to a largely white part of the city. “We’ve got values voters up there, Catholics. My people up there say they can carry four to six wards this year, and four years ago, they carried none.”
The "trimming" idea could also work with the Philly area's Jewish population. Jews usually vote about 80% Democratic, but with attacks on Obama's Israel cred and the Reverend Wright "attack," if they can trim away ten percent of the Jewish support, pick up another 10 or 15% from whites who supported Hillary who are uncomfortable, or outright racist-- and you better believe there are plenty of racists in Philly-- then McCain just might pull it off.
Fortunately for Obama, Democratic registrations have soared statewide. Hopefully, for the senator from Illinois, enough of those registrations will include, not just people who registered to vote for Hillary in the primary but also people who will stay Democratic on November fourth.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
