For several months now, Kos has been on this story that the the rise of the Western Democrat is result of Libertarian Democrats. I want to offer a differing explanation that's not neccesarily mutually exclusive.
It's the Perot voters, Stupid!
Perot Vote by county, higher Perot %'s marked with deeper Green.
Bizarrely competitive races in Idaho and Wyoming raise interesting questions, like where the hell did the people who are making these races competitive come from?
They came from 1992.
1992 was one of those bizarre years when an independent candidate managed to break into the big leagues and poll high enough to get into the debates.
So while Kos waxes on about Libertarian Democrats, I'm going to point to the voters drawn to the populism of Ross Perot in 1992, who defected to the Republicans in 1994. A look at the vote percentages from the race is even more interesting. In a slew of Western states (Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado) Perot neared or topped a quarter of the vote. In demographics Perot took votes in rural and suburban areas. The more urban an area, the lower the Perot vote. The younger the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Perot.
Rural voters, and the young were drawn to his reform message and in 1994, many of them defected to Republicans based upon the "Contract with America." Many of them now likely feel that that contract has been broken. We have raging deficit spending, international adventures that make the peacemaking missions of the Clinton White House look quaint, and that "sucking sound" has emptied out the heartland of America. I think that Kos labels these voters libertarians because of their anti-authority slant, but I think it's misleading.
These are reform minded voters, who are driven by the perception of corruption. And much to the Republican's chagrin reform is more effective as a negative message (Let's kick the bums out) than as a positive one (let's implement my 500 point plan for America.)
It's the label and the implication drawn from that that I dispute, not the conclusion that there is a large group of voters who will swing to Democrats this fall.
And the Republicans know all this. Just yesterday talking about the Washington posts published a revealing quote from Mark Souder, a Republican in a "safe" seat (IN-3) worried about a Democratic landslide.
Still, Souder said the primary factor preventing a Democratic landslide has been the failure of Democrats to a present a clear alternative. Souder, who first won his seat in 1994, said he spent the past few days studying the run-up to the election 12 years ago and found that Republicans are in a slightly better position. But "right now, it is not closing right," he said.
Exactly, there's been a large mass of undecideds out in rural and suburban America who the Republicans have been eyeing nervously since the spring. Republicans in "safe" districts have been running an awful lot of internal polling, and they know that the Perot voters are up for grabs this year.
It's a matter of how the close, do the close to the right like Souder is hoping for, or do the close to the left as Souder fears. Everyone thinks that the fight this fall is for the big city suburbs, but the truth is that it's highly likely that the small towns and rural areas that are presumed to be deep red are going to give the Republicans a suprise. That red ocean in middle America that Republicans like to brag about in the heart of America is going to break blue.
Update
Someone made a good point about Perot voters being split 50/50 between Clinton and Bush.
I've cleaned up a map of the state results for Perot in 1996, and I think it only support the point I'm trying to make. The hunter green is above 12%, the highlighter green is above 8%, and the rest are below that and above 4% (except in DC, which was lower.)
If what we are looking at is Reform voters, the second map offers a better undertanding of where the reform minded voters who are most likely to break from Republicans are at.