Winning without Ohio and Florida

While the media and party establishments still have a hard time getting beyond the traditional battleground state mentality, the Obama campaign continues to push the envelope.

Plouffe and his aides are weighing where to contest, and where chances are too slim to marshal a large effort. A win in Virginia (13 electoral votes) or Georgia (15 votes) could give Obama a shot if he, like Kerry, loses Ohio or Florida.

Plouffe also has been touting Obama's appeal in once Republican-leaning states where Democrats have made gains in recent gubernatorial and congressional races, such as Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, Alaska and North Dakota.

Obama's campaign has spent heavily on time and money in Virginia, where a Democratic presidential candidate hasn't won since 1964. In recent elections, however, high-profile Republicans have lost there. And in a sign of how serious Obama is taking the state, Plouffe dispatched to Virginia many aides who helped Obama stage his upset win in the Iowa caucuses Jan. 3.

The key, Plouffe told supporters, will be to register new black voters and new young voters in Virginia.
Likewise, Georgia has many unregistered black voters who could turn out in record numbers to support the first major-party nominee who is black, he argued. Plouffe said the campaign also will keep an eye on Mississippi and Louisiana as the race moves into the fall to see if new black voters could put them within reach.

Obama currently faces a 10-15-point deficit in Georgia, but the Obama campaign clearly sees something in the Peach State, as it has dispatched early staff to the state and has aggressively promoted its status as a potential swing state. Most polling will use traditional turnout models to weigh their samples, so if the Obama campaign is counting on massive voter registration drives and record African American turnout, that would go a long way toward closing that double-digit trap.

We've talked about Mississippi before, but Louisiana?  Check it out:

A Democratic voter registration drive in largely black neighborhoods of Louisiana has swamped the state’s voter registrar offices, forcing them to hire new staff members and work 12-hour days to process thousands of applications [...]

Democratic officials said the Louisiana drive, which was called Voting is Power, had produced 74,000 applications by the time it concluded last week. Registrars in the four main parishes where the drive operated report numbers closer to 50,000, but there is no breakdown of how many were submitted to other parishes.

Louisiana went to Bush by a 57-42 margin. The raw vote difference was roughly 282,000. Continued voter registration efforts could put a serious dent into that gap, while the hope would be that Obama's superior organization and broader support (than Kerry), not to mention overall Republican apathy toward their nominee, could narrow the gap further.

And then there's money. If Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi tighten, McCain, already lagging far behind in money and constrained in the general election by taking public financing, will have a tough choice between defending what should be easy holds and spending the HUGE bucks required to seriously contest expensive Blue states like Pennsylvania while desperately holding on to expensive Red ones like Florida.

And that's just the South. The Mountain West presents a whole new set of opportunities, as we've already discussed in great detail.

Florida is currently very tight, and Ohio is even tighter. McCain will have the fight of his life just holding on to those traditional swing states. But this election isn't 2000 or 2004. The election can ultimately be decided elsewhere.