Well, over two weeks after the country elected Obama as the next president, we here in Missouri are ready to tell our electors to cast their quaint, electorally votes for the Senator from Arizona.
Yes, by a margin of just a little over 3600 votes, Missouri is finally ready to shed the "bellwether" moniker it's held in presidential contests for 100 years.
In doing so, ask yourself this:
How can a state that narrowly sent a Democratic Senator to DC in 2006 susequently elect a Democratic governor with 60% of the vote and yet, vote for the Republican ticket for president?
Or overwhelmingly elect a Democrat as Sec of State?
Or even a Democratic Attorney General?
The mind boggles at the apparent schizophrenia of the Missouri voter. Or does it?
I suppose you could boil the results down into two major, and fairly obvious areas:
- How the candidates campaigned, and
- Issues.
Let's spend some time looking at both. Then let's look at the 800 pound gorilla in the room, race.
1. How The Candidates Campaigned.
The Obama campaign put significant resources into winning the state. They clearly used what I call the McCaskill 2006 template. That template calls for more than just a massive GOTV effort in KC and STL; it entails going out into the red, rural areas and asking people to vote for you. Otherwise, rural Dems quite frankly don't have a tendency to vote for a national candidate. Howard Dean hit the nail on the head back in 04 when he said that people want to be asked for their vote and that really applies to rural Missouri Democrats.
Combine a "campaign in most of the counties" effort, a massive broadcasting presence with a depressed Republican turnout and you have a chance, repeat, a chance, of carrying a statewide federal race.
In that regard, we are hardly unique. Look at two prominent states that flipped this time around, IN and NC, and you'll see the same pattern in terms of rural/urban divides with blue enclaves typically centered around universities.
The Obama campaign clearly approached Missouri differently than Kerry. The latter bailed from here about 3 seconds after he was nominated. Hey John, guess what? Voters really, really don't like it when you blow off their state. That's why Hillary Clinton romped to such huge margins in West Virginia and Kentucky in the Democratic primaries, where Obama essentially refused to campaign. It's why Obama won by more than expected in Wisconsin and South Carolina, which Clinton pulled out of early. It's why Rudy Giuliani's decision to ignore every state that didn't begin with an 'F', end with an 'a', and have 'lorid' in the middle was a catastrophic failure.
Thus, we saw Obama in places like Union, a a town of 9500, 95% white in Franklin County, about 45 miles south of St Louis. Union? I doubt even Harry Truman went to Union when he was campaigning in 1948. Or Biden deep in the heart of central redness in Jeff City (he outdrew Governor Gidget). Or the field offices all over the state. And yet, it wasn't enough. Some have stated that Obama "never devoted the sustained attention to rural Missouri that...was required to win the state."
Um, what more could a national candidate have done? Quite frankly, his campaign had more presence out here in red, rural Missouri than McCaskill's 06 campaign did. He flooded the state with advertising. His vaunted ground game was alive and well in KC and STL. Thus, that criticism doesn't fly.
So, if we assume for a moment that Obama ran as good a campaign as any Dem could here, then why the essential tie vote?
2. Issues.
What people still don't get is that rural Missouri is still very much dominated by the Three G crowd. Well, okay, if my neighbors are any indication, they could give a crap about gays one way or the other. But, they still very much inhabit their own various single-issue, social conservative ghettos be they the Pro-Birther Ghetto or the "HILLARY CLINTON WILL PERSONALLY COME AND TAKE AWAY ALL MY GUNS" ghetto.
As such, any Republican campaign that works those angles still has a tendency to do well here despite the national despoiling of the Republican brand by the Worst President Ever Imaginable and the economy going into the toilet.
So, how did the McCain campaign, with less money (but plenty of physical presence) compete on issues? It didn't. Instead, it did a good job of exemplifying how the Republican electoral majority operated from 1980-2004. Think about it. His campaign was essentially Lee Atwater 1988 only this time using Wright and Ayers instead of Willie Horton. We saw the same old charges of anti-capitalism and lack of patriotism with Palin being the messenger in place of Quayle.
In other words, this campaign was a classic, forceful use of the Southern Strategy.
And while the country, as a whole, rejected that, Missouri didn't. Hence, our electors go to McCain, if only barely.
All the while, we elected a Dem governor with 60% of the vote. WTF? Or re-elect the Dem Sec of State by an equally wide margin? And yet, we increased the Republican majority in the state Senate. Are we as voters not that bright? Was money a factor? If it were that easy, Obama could have won here with (Jay)Nixonian numbers.
The SecState reelection is actually easy to figure out: name recognition and an understanding by the average rural Republican voter that that office has no effective say in the social issues that matter most to them. OTOH, their local state Senator is seen as having much greater influence over those issues, thus, it's easy to pull the lever for an "inconsequential Dem" for SecState while still sending a classic Missouri Wingnut to the state Senate.
All this being said, I can't figure out Nixon's success. Social issue wise, he's fairly scary to most rural voters and as governor, he's wields a fair amount of power even if opposed by two staunchly Republican chambers in the legislature. And then there was his opponent, "my" former Congressman Kenny Hulsof: a standard wingnut we breed in great quantities here. Given the dynamics of the federal races, it's hard to see why Hulsof did as poorly as he did. Was it a money thing? Pure name recognition? Or is there some subtle difference Missouri voters see in statewide candidates for state office versus federal?
Which brings us back to Obama. Consider these steps:
- Find charismatic candidate.
- Run against most unpopular office holder since dirt was formed.
- Hope opponent nominates backwoods religious nut who spends at least six months of every year in total darkness as running mate.
- Hope economy heads into a three-holer outhouse that's not been cleaned in 45 years.
- Count on your own ground game to overwhelm a depressed opposition turnout.
Recipe for success? Not in Missouri. The Southern Strategy still trumps it...at least here.
Senator McCaskill tried to spin this as "...an independent streak" or "Missourians...are perfectly willing to split their ticket and willing to send split messsages." Well Claire, you're right on the first part but have your head in the sand on the last part. Why? Let's look at some numbers.
In 2008, the overall Dem margin of victory in the six statewide contests (Pres, Gov, Lt Gov, AG, SecState and State Treasurer) was +8%.
Compare this to 2004, same offices as above plus one Senate seat (Bond's) and the Rep average margin of victory was 8%. More importantly, Bush's victory margin was 7% which means he performed consistent with the statewide vote or at worst, 1% worse than the statewide party level.
Going back to the future, in this case 2008, if we toss out the high and low victory margin outliers, in this case McCain at 0.1% and Carnahan (Dem SecState) at 26%, the Dem average margin of victory was 5.5%. Thus, Obama underperformed the ticket at that level.
Senator McCaskill would have you think that this 5.5% of the voters are the "split" voters. Senator McCaskill should get out more often. All the surveys indicate voters trust Dems on the issues, chalk one up for Obama. He certainly wasn't unknown. Just look at the crowds he pulled in in KC and STL during the final stages of the campaign. Chalk another one up for Obama.
Which leads us back to the Southern Strategy...and race. We have a lot of Southern "Reagan" Dems in this state and the Southern Strategy apparently continues to resonate with them. And it would appear that they comprise, oh, about 5.5% of the voters in this state.
Who won't vote for a black man for president.
And in that regard, perhaps we are unique, at least when compared to IN and NC where you might expect the Southern Strategy to still work. Perhaps it didn't work because their demographics are changing more rapidly than ours so that their "Reagan" Dems are smaller in number.
Anyway, good bye bellwether, at least for another four years.