Obama's risky electoral strategy
WILL BARACK Obama go with the flow or reverse the tide in this year's presidential election? In both 2000 and 2004, the Democratic nominee came within one state of winning the Electoral College, so one could argue that even a slight bump in the party's national popularity will push a few Democratic-trending states into Obama's column and guarantee him a win. The alternative view, forcefully advocated by Hillary Clinton in the primaries, is that the Democrats need to take back states that have drifted away from the party since Bill Clinton left the White House.
Obama is certainly not conceding historically Democratic states where George Bush made significant gains in 2004, but he is signaling a preference to fight in places where the GOP showed signs of slippage in the last election. Paradoxically, this path of least resistance could dramatically change the electoral map. At a fund-raiser earlier this month, campaign manager David Plouffe told the crowd that Obama could win the election even if he loses both Florida and Ohio, two states that Bill Clinton carried in 1996.
Also, the Obama campaign recently deployed thousands of volunteers to 17 "key" states, and conspicuously absent from the list are several states that voted for Bill Clinton twice before shifting strongly toward Bush (Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia). Instead, Obama is concentrating on Colorado, North Carolina, and Virginia, which have voted Republican in every election since 1976 but failed to give Bush much of a boost in 2004.
Those three states contain significant splotches of the lighter shading on the map above, which does not show the familiar red vs. blue breakdown of the United States, but instead shows how voting patterns changed between Bush's first and second election. (Darker areas are where Bush enjoyed a significant boost; lighter areas are where he received little or no benefit from running as the incumbent.) One striking aspect about the map is how closely it resembles the results of the Democratic primaries and caucuses this year. Obama ran best on the mid-Atlantic coast and in the northern reaches of the West Coast, the Rocky Mountain states, and the Midwest, where the beginnings of a backlash against the GOP could be discerned four years ago. He was weaker in the Appalachians, the New York City area, and southern California, where Bush had flexed the most muscle in 2004 and where Democrats may be the most nervous about their chances of taking the White House back this year.
Overall, Obama won 60 percent of the primary/caucus vote in counties where Bush's share of the vote fell between 2000 and 2004. These included much of northern Virginia, the Durham and Charlotte areas of North Carolina, and the metro areas of St. Louis and Columbus, Ohio. At the same time, Obama got only 36 percent of the primary/caucus vote in counties where Bush gained at least five points in his second run. These included not only central Florida and nearly all of Tennessee, but also most of New Jersey and large chunks of Pennsylvania, the latter two carried by John Kerry in 2004. It would be ironic if Obama snatched Colorado and even such traditionally Republican states as Montana and North Dakota but still lost the election because New Jersey floated away from the Democrats.
Indeed, Obama's Colorado strategy is something of a leap of faith, as the last three Democrats to capture the White House each did so by erasing trends from the previous election. In 1960, John F. Kennedy surged in places where moderate Republican Dwight Eisenhower had made inroads (including most of the Northeast) during the 1950s.
And Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both dramatically increased their party's performance in rural and Southern areas four years after those areas turned sharply against Northern nominees (George McGovern and Michael Dukakis).
Unfortunately for the Democratic Party, Carter and Clinton were able to reverse their party's losses in states like Kentucky and Tennessee only temporarily. Republicans Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had little trouble sweeping the Southern interior in 1980 and 2000. So it may not be worth it for Obama to try winning back those Appalachian Democrats he lost so badly in the primaries. If he's thinking ahead to 2012 and beyond, finally pushing states like Colorado into the Democratic column may be a more promising strategy.
Robert David Sullivan, a guest columnist, is the managing editor of CommonWealth magazine.
