NIXON'S COMING:

All Eyes on Dixie: Perhaps. But Democrats on the hunt for new electoral votes should look to Ohio. (Cliff Schecter and Ruy Teixeira, American Prospect)

Putting the Gore-Nader vote together as an indicator of underlying Democratic strength, and comparing it with the Bush-Buchanan vote, the eight closest states the Democrats won in 2000 and will have to defend in 2004 are Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. Using the same comparison, here are the eight closest states the Democrats lost in 2000, some of which they will obviously have to win in 2004: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Tennessee. By these rankings, only two out of 16 states critical to Democratic chances are in the South. Compare that with six in the Midwest and four in the Southwest and you have a sense of the mathematical logic that is driving the Democrats to focus their 2004 presidential strategy outside the South.

That logic is reflected in the state targeting lists put out by Democratic voter-mobilization groups. For example, Steve Rosenthal's America Coming Together (ACT), which is shaping up to be the most important of these organizations, has a list of 17 targeted states, only two of which are in the South (including Florida, but with Arkansas substituted for Tennessee). The rest of ACT's list is the same as above, with the addition of Maine and the substitution of West Virginia for Colorado. [...]

One of the advantages of the non-southern strategy is that the Democratic presidential candidate won't have to try to appeal to a bloc of very conservative southern white voters who aren't likely to vote for him anyway. In Georgia, for example, more white voters say they're conservative than say they're moderate, and almost a third say they're members of the religious right. And, of course, white voters in Georgia are notoriously susceptible to racial politics around issues like the Confederate flag. A national Democratic candidate who tailors his message to these voters will likely succeed only in depressing base turnout, without any compensating electoral payoff.

The possible disadvantage is that the candidate, free from this constraint, will run too far to the left in order to please the liberal base of the Democratic Party. That would be unfortunate, as well as quite stupid. The whole point of this strategy should be to allow the Democrats to craft a clear message that both excites liberal base voters and holds appeal for moderate white swing voters, especially in the Midwest where the loss of manufacturing jobs and health-care access have hit particularly hard.

A quick look at Ohio -- perhaps the most coveted Democratic electoral target in the coming election -- illustrates this. Al Gore lost Ohio's 21 electoral votes by less than 4 points in 2000, and the combined Gore-Nader vote ran only 2 points behind the combined Bush-Buchanan vote. In that election, Gore got 41 percent of the white vote; 44 percent and he would have won the state.

Even Bob Dole stayed within six points of Bill Clinton in Ohio, and that was with Ross Perot taking 11%. Hard to see how it's anything but a waste of time and resources for a MA liberal to try and make it a battleground.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 15, 2004 6:00 PM