NEW YORK -- A new poll shows that John McCain leads Barack Obama in 39 states, but unfortunately
for McCain, most of those states are outside America. In the Indian state of Gujarat, McCain holds a commanding 59-38 lead over Obama, thanks largely to an endorsement from Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
The poll, conducted by the right-leaning advocacy group, Global Think, and released less than a week before the presidential election, indicates that McCain enjoys pockets of popularity around the world. Though the vast majority of the 3,461 people polled can't vote in the Nov. 4 election, the results surprised political analysts, many of whom believed that Obama would be more popular than McCain in almost every country.
The McCain Campaign, searching desperately for any glimmer of hope that the Arizona senator can pull off an upset next Tuesday, touted the poll results as a sign that McCain was finally breaking through.
"Our message is reaching every corner of the world," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. "We believe that the good people of Pennsylvania and Ohio will support Senator McCain on Tuesday as strongly as people in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh do."
In addition to the two Indian states, McCain enjoys strong support in China, Russia, North Korea, Turkmenistan and Antarctica.
The Obama campaign downplayed the poll results, accusing Global Think of deliberately surveying people in countries or states where McCain was likely to be popular. "There are 54 countries in Africa," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said, "but somehow the only one surveyed was Central African Republican. I mean, Republic."
While no Africa-wide polls have been conducted, the Kenyan newspaper, Daily Nation, surveyed 1,000 people in early October and found that 999 supported Obama. The sole McCain supporter was a man named Josiah Mbacho, who had once been involved in a fight over homebrewed beer with Obama's second cousin Suleiman Obama.
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