Some Michigan Republican officials are questioning why McCain appears to have abandoned the state. Michigan GOP opposes McCain pullout

In the aftermath of John McCain's decision to pull out of Michigan, Republicans in the state are expressing shock and bewilderment at his move — and aren't willing to cede the state's 17 electoral votes just yet.

“We’re blindsided, along with everybody else in Michigan,” said Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson. “I feel like I woke up this morning, and there was a note on my pillow.”


“When the general leaves the battlefield when the fight’s still going on, it creates a lot of chaos,” he said.

Saul Anuzis, the chairman of the state party, sent out a fundraising message Friday morning that called McCain’s decision “a tough blow.”

“The McCain campaign announced they were shifting resources and staff out of Michigan to other targeted states. Other states ‘today’ offer a better opportunity for the campaign,” Anuzis wrote on his blog, paraphrasing the McCain campaign’s explanation. “We do not agree.”

Michigan had been seen as one of McCain’s top targets among the states Sen. John F. Kerry won in 2004, along with Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. The Republican now appears resigned to the state's electoral votes — which Kerry claimed by a little more than 3 percentage points and the Real Clear Politics polling average now shows Barack Obama leading by 7 points — going to the Democrat.

Mike Duhaime, the McCain campaign’s political director, explained the decision as a necessary tactical choice.

"It's been the worst state of all the states that are in play," he said in a conference call Thursday. "It's the obvious state, in my perspective, to come off the list."

Some Democrats were hesitant to declare victory and viewed McCain’s move with suspicion, suggesting sinister motives behind the Arizona senator’s very public departure from the state.

“Who announces with such fanfare that they’re leaving, other than to let you think that they’re gone?” asked Democratic Lt. Gov. John D. Cherry, who predicted that McCain’s announcement could be a prelude to a flurry of anti-Obama advertising by independent groups.

“I think the announcement you’re reading is an invitation for independent groups to come in and do that sort of thing,” Cherry suggested, adding that, for McCain to win the state Republicans, he would have to engage in “some very outrageous stuff.”

In September, a group called Freedom’s Defense Fund launched a small buy of independent anti-Obama ads in Macomb County, Mich., where working-class “Reagan Democrats” are a powerful voting bloc, that attempted to tie Obama to his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and indicted Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Thus far, though, Michigan has yet to see any statewide or well-funded independent effort aimed at tilting the race against either candidate.

State Rep. Tonya Schuitmaker, the assistant Republican floor leader in the Michigan House of Representatives, said Cherry’s theory was not implausible.

“I don’t have any knowledge as to whether that will happen or not, but I think that’s definitely a possibility,” Schuitmaker said, though she explained that she thought McCain’s pullout was ‘’the wrong decision to make.”

“Obviously he has to make it based on the financial information and the polling numbers, but I think it might’ve been a little premature,” she said. “He still has a fighting chance here.”

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, seemed to agree with that assessment Friday, expressing dismay at her own campaign’s decision in an interview with Fox News Channel.

“I want to get back to Michigan, and I want to try,” she told reporter Carl Cameron. “Todd and I, we’d be happy to get back to Michigan. We’d be so happy to speak to the people there in Michigan who are hurting.”

McCain supporter Chuck Yob, a former Republican National Committeeman for Michigan, underscored Palin's sentiments in a public e-mail Friday.

"There will still be a campaign for John McCain in Michigan whether it is sanctioned by the professionals in Washington, D.C., or not," Yob wrote.

As much as some Republicans might want McCain-Palin back in Michigan, McCain’s poll numbers have dropped precipitously in recent state polling. And while his campaign’s decision to leave the state was abrupt, it was not completely unforeseeable.

Since the crisis on Wall Street began two weeks ago, Obama has steadily widened his advantage over McCain. In a poll taken Sept. 14-17 by the Michigan firm EPIC-MRA, McCain trailed Obama by just 1 point. In a new poll taken from Sept. 20-22, that gap had widened to 10 points.

And in an even more recent survey conducted by the Iowa firm Selzer & Co., Obama led McCain 51 percent to 38 percent.

“Among whites, I still think he is lagging among older white men without a college education, but everyone else, including independent women, [is] moving toward Obama,” EPIC-MRA President Bernie Porn.

Porn suggested that shift could largely be explained by the reemergence of economic issues as the central focus of the general election campaign — and McCain’s shaky response to developing events on Wall Street.

“As much as it was about any positive messages Obama might have had, I think it also involved miscues on the part of the McCain campaign, inconsistencies, contradictions,” he said. “Calling off his campaign and everything, I’m not sure people responded to that the way the McCain campaign expected them to.”

Democrat Bill Crouchman, chairman of the Macomb County Commission, agreed that economic issues were driving McCain’s numbers down.

“Southeast Michigan has really been in a recession now for about three years,” he said. “What the country’s feeling now, we’ve been going through for quite a while, so the economy, around here, is the issue.”

“Of course,” Crouchman jabbed, “[McCain’s] quote that he didn’t know much about economics didn’t help things for him.”

Patterson acknowledged McCain could have had a stronger response to the economic meltdown.

“Maybe he’s not as quick on the draw as everyone would want him to be, but Obama’s given him many opportunities to respond and knock it out of the park,” he said. “I don’t know how the hell [the economic crisis] got laid off on Republicans. McCain just wasn’t up to the task for some reason.”

Though he sounded similarly frustrated in an entry on his blog, Anuzis did his best to buck up Republican spirits, claiming the party would do its best to stay in the game.

“We will have a revised plan in effect by next week and are not conceding an inch to the Obama campaign or any Democrats in Michigan,” he wrote. “This is a battleground state, the numbers always tighten up and we will bring the McCain campaign back to Michigan by our own efforts statewide.”