Winning Coalitions and the South in 2008

I am a believer in the fifty state strategy of contesting every race from local dog catcher to the deepest red Congressional seat to the Presidency as a means of both party-building and as a low cost hedge against a Republican candidate or incumbent imploding thus allowing for an unanticipated windfall victory. I support the idea that Democrats should run 435 House nominees, and I support an intense focus on running sixty or more competent and well funded House campaigns as I believe that the national environment is such that Democrats can pick up a double digit net gain even while losing a few seats in Georgia and a couple of the scandal babies from 2006.

However I also recognize that on a Presidential level devoting significant resources to pile-up a victory in Massachusetts or to avoid being crushed in Utah by forty points is counterproductive to assembling a winning coalition of at least 270 electoral votes. The relevant question is how does a Democratic Presidential nominee build that winning coalition and thus what choices they make, what groups and interests they suck up to and whom do they screw.

It has been traditional Democratic conventional wisdom that any Democrat who wants to win the White House has to win at least a couple of states in the South. This argument is usually used to support a Southern Democrat on the grounds that the South will not vote for a non-regional Democrat but everywhere else is willing to vote for a Democrat from the South even if they are not thrilled about it. Recently MSNBCC in a horse-race piece, showed that John Edwards is trumpeting this electability claim as he is the leading fundraiser from the deep South.

Some Southern states bucked the trend, mostly as a result of steady donations from Palm Beach and Miami in Florida and Virginia’s Washington suburbs.

Counting only Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, Edwards raised $2,723,000. That’s more than six times Clinton’s take of $440,471 and nearly four times the $705,650 raised by Obama, according to numbers compiled by PoliticalMoneyLine.org, an online repository of campaign finance data.....

Dominated by Republicans in recent elections, the South is considered a critical region for GOP presidential candidates. When the party holds the South, as President Bush did in his two victories, Democrats must win about 70 percent of the electoral vote outside the South to compensate,....

When Democrats are able to peel off a few Southern states—as Bill Clinton did in his 1992 and 1996 victories—they have far more breathing room in the rest of the country, Black said.

However I am not sure if pursuing the South as a critical part of a winning coalition given the highly probable political environment makes any sense. USA Today has an interesting piece yesterday that lays out the basic political environment and unless there is a massive exogenous shock to the system or a Democratic flame-out of unbelievable proportions, the ground looks very favorable for a Democratic victory:

In one of the best-known formulas to predict presidential elections, devised in 1981 by historian Allan Lichtman, six of 13 "keys" have turned against the GOP, enough to forecast defeat of the party that holds the White House.

The formula — which takes into account economic data, midterm election results, foreign policy developments, domestic unrest and candidates' charisma — has accurately forecast the popular-vote winner in the past six elections. Applied to previous contests, it points to the winner in every election back to 1860, according to Lichtman, a professor at American University.

He and other analysts say the political landscape the year before a presidential election hasn't so overwhelmingly favored one party over the other in a generation or more, at least since Reagan won a landslide re-election over Democrat Walter Mondale in 1984.

Democrats aren't assured a victory in 2008, but they almost certainly face an easier task ahead than their Republican opponents.

This generic environment is already impacting down ballot Republican efforts as The Hill is reporting the troubles that the National Republican Senate Committee is having in finding money and high quality candidates.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is facing many of the same problems it battled last cycle, raising about half as much money as its Democratic counterpart and failing to recruit a single major candidate nearly six months after the 2006 elections.

The lack of money and candidates last year heaped criticism onto the committee, then under the leadership of Sen. Elizabeth Dole (N.C.). Republicans say many of the plagues of 2006 are lingering into 2008, and that the criticism will start to flow again unless tangible progress is made......

when it comes to recruiting success stories, the NRSC doesn’t have a single leg to stand on.

The NRSC has yet to land one substantial candidate, while the DSCC has several candidates in Minnesota and New Hampshire, along with leading candidates and presumptive nominees in Colorado, Idaho and Maine.

The only major Republican challenger right now is a potential primary challenger — Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning.

In this political environment the Democratic Party should be able to win the White House and expand upon its House and Senate majorities short of a massive fiasco, these victories would probably even survive a moderately sized cluster fuck. George Will, in a column pimping Republican Tommy Thompson, argues that the GOP nominee, even if they carry the entire South needs to pull off an inside straight to assemble their marginal winning coalition:

Republicans should assume that in 2008 they will lose Ohio (20 electoral votes), where the state party's corruption and incompetence cost it the governorship, a U.S. Senate seat and a House seat in 2006. So the GOP candidate must carry Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota (27 electoral votes). In 2004, George W. Bush narrowly carried Iowa and narrowly lost Wisconsin and Minnesota, the only state that has voted Democratic in eight consecutive elections.

If the rest of the map freezes from 2004, the flipping of Ohio to the Democratic column gives the Democrats a marginal wining coalition. I have a hard time seeing any Blue state flipping in 2008, and the Republicans are going to have to work very hard to hold onto their marginally red states such as New Mexico and Iowa as the first two examples. Furthermore as the MSNBC article noted above, Northern Virginia is leading the rest of the state purple, and Democrats have a recent demonstrated history of being able to win tough races in that state. My buddy, Mr. M at Comments from Left Field, is speculating that Gov. Tim Kaine could make a good VP candidate for a multitude of reasons, one of which is bringing Virginia into play.

The Democrats have a very coherent winning coalition that excludes the Deep South as a marginal deciding factor, and this is the coalitional strategy that I hope whomever is the nominee pursues as I am a liberal, and the political realities of a Democratic Presidency that is not indebted to the Deep South for their margin of victory, combined with a Democratic House Caucus that does not have to win a majority in the Deep white South means that liberal policy goals have a much higher probability of being implemented than when a winning coalition relies on switching a few conservative leaning marginal voters in the Deep South.