Looking for the map-changing campaign
by kos
Wed Mar 12, 2008 at 05:04:24 PM PDT
"Most of those states haven’t voted Democratic in a presidential since the Johnson landslide over Goldwater in 1964, and we don’t see that changing," said Harold Ickes, a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton. "They’re great states, but Idaho, Nebraska and the Carolinas are not going to be in the Democratic column in November. He’s winning the Democratic process, but that is virtually irrelevant to the general election."
First of all, it's funny that he says that Obama is "winning the Democratic process", but that it's "irrelevant". Nice framing there, Harold.
But beyond that, here's the Clinton campaign once again automatically writing off entire swaths of the country.
Should we write off all those states? North Carolina and Nebraska can absolutely be competitive. According to SurveyUSA, North Carolina is currently only a 47-45 McCain state against Obama. And given the torrid growth of the state's Research Triangle, the Democratic gains in the state's 2006 mid-term elections at both the state and federal levels, and the overall negative climate for Republicans, NC is _absolutely_ in play. Even Clinton's 8-point deficit in the state in that SUSA poll suggests that it is the case.
Remember, 2004 "swing states" Missouri was lost by seven, Washington was won by seven, Florida was lost by five, and so on. A minus eight deficit absolutely puts a state in play, and that the Clinton campaign would insult a state as irrelevant at this junction is shocking and counterproductive -- yet more evidence that the Clinton campaign is intent on waging last cycle's battles, rather than looking toward a map-changing future.
Then there's Nebraska. Believe it or not, Nebraska has always been in play because it splits its electoral votes by congressional district. In fact, the Kerry campaign made an unsuccessful play for some of those EVs.
Since Nebraska created its split system for apportioning electoral votes in 1991 - joining only Maine in not using a winner-take-all system - Nebraska's electoral votes always have gone to the Republican. In his 2000 race against Democrat Al Gore, Bush carried Nebraska with 62 percent of the vote.
The state's electoral votes have not gone to a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson claimed them 40 years ago.
Early last summer, the Kerry campaign hoped to change that.
With projections of another sharply divided national election, in which every electoral vote counts, the Kerry campaign hired a state coordinator for Nebraska. Kerry advisers were convinced that the electoral votes in Nebraska's 1st and 2nd Districts could be up for grabs.
Local Democrats started talking about turning Nebraska "purple" on electoral maps, a mix of blue for Democrats and red for Republicans.
That SUSA poll shows Clinton losing Nebraska badly, but Obama -- surprise! -- picks up two of the state's five EVs, and trails narrowly statewide 45-42.
In Crashing the Gate, Jerome Armstrong and I write:
The Democratic Party is in the upswing in the Mountain West and the South, in places like Montana and Virginia, because Democrats there have made a serious effort to compete for votes everywhere, rather than make a nominal effort to be an "also-ran" outside the Democratic-density areas. As [former Virginia Gov. Mark] Warner asks, how many more times will the Democrats run presidential campaigns where they abandon thirty-three southern and western states and "launch a national campaign that goes after sixteen states and then hope that we can hit a triple bank shot to get to that seventeenth state?"
In the 1992 and the 1996 presidential elections, with three candidates in the race, as many as thirty states were viewed as competitive battleground contests up through election day. In 2000, that number dropped to just seventeen by election day. In 2004, the number of contested states early in the presidential contest stood at eighteen, and was whittled down to about eight by election day.
This strategy—or more accurately this obsession—that the Democratic establishment in D.C. has with narrowing electoral campaigns to ever shrinking "swing states" is self-defeating. It doesn’t build any new converts to the party, it makes it easier for the Republicans to walk away with huge chunks of the country unchallenged, and it starves the Democratic Parties in those "red" states. But don’t tell that to Bob Shrum, the über-consultant who lost eight presidential campaigns so far and won zero. Asked by writer Ben Smith in the November 21, 2005, issue of the New York Observer whether he had any regrets about his work on Kerry’s campaign, Shrum responded that had he believed Florida would go for Bush so strongly, "the campaign would have sent more resources—including Mr. Kerry—to Ohio." One can only hope that Bob Shrum won’t be back in 2008 to run one more Democratic candidate into the ground with his overpriced expertise and a three-state strategy.
The Clinton campaign may not have Bob Shrum in its ranks, but Mark Penn, Harold Ickes, and the rest of that gang seem just as committed as ever to their shrinking pool of "swing states". The Clinton gang is doing what Mark Warner decries -- minimizing, belittling, and ignoring southern and western "red" states and claiming that the only states that matter are, predictably, the states that "mattered" last election (Ohio and Florida).
But that's the old map, and it's an obsolete one.
One campaign is irrationally attached to that old map, while the other is focused on being a map changer -- spurring Democratic victories in unexpected places and generating a true national mandate for change.
It's easy to see which campaign is which.
- ::