Beyond Red & Blue

Third-party strongholds

Here's a quickie map for third-party enthusiasts, especially those who hope that Libertarian Party nominee and former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr will cause a lot of mischief in the South. The South, in fact, has shown the least enthusiasm for third-party candidacies over the past three decades, perhaps in part because so many major-party nominees have come from the region.

From 1936 through 1972, most "spoilers" were cultural conservatives such as Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, but since then liberals and libertarians have dominated the third-party vote -- most notably John Anderson, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, and the various Libertarian nominees who have approached 1 percent of the vote. (Perot wasn't a total liberal or libertarian, but he indicated little interest in "family values" issues.) That there isn't a significant social or religious conservative running outside the two major parties this year -- even with John McCain as the GOP nominee -- suggests that the South will continue to be at the low end of the "other" vote.

Note: Broomfield County, Colorado, and La Paz County, Arizona, are not colored on the map because they did not yet exist in 1976.

Jackson vs. Obama

Yesterday's Boston Globe has a piece by Joseph Williams on the ambivalence of older African-American political leaders (i.e., Jesse Jackson) toward Barack Obama's presidential campaign. I was struck by this passage:

"We don't need Jesse Jackson to be divisive," said Jerome Jenkins, 44, sipping a glass of wine at a downtown Washington cigar bar. "It's Barack's time. If the man's going to be president, let him be president."

By making the debate public, Jenkins said, Jackson feeds white-held stereotypes: "They'll say, 'Look at the blacks -- they still can't get together,' " he said.

Actually, I think that the white-held stereotype is that blacks stick together, and the dispute between Obama and Jackson helps to break that stereotype.

McCain vs. the third-term curse

My column in the Boston Globe this week is on the difficulty of a political party winning a third consecutive term in the White House, and where the eight-year itch tends to be strongest. The accompanying map is not on the Globe's website (they seem inconsistent on this), but you can see it below.

Dog owners are McCain voters (Or is it the other way around?)

Pollster.com has a good vivisection of an AP story on a poll purporting to show that dog lovers want John McCain as president. The story began by seriously (?) suggesting that dog owners have taken note that McCain has more than a dozen canines while Barack Obama has no pets at all -- and that this difference may determine their votes. The story has two quotes from "random" voters (probably friends of friends of AP staffers) who don't actually say that they're voting on this basis:

"I think a person who owns a pet is a more compassionate person — caring, giving, trustworthy. I like pet owners," said Janet Taylor of Plymouth, Mass.

As Pollster.com points out, pet owners are more likely to be married and more likely to be white, which makes them more likely to support McCain anyway. I would add that Obama does better among cat owners than dog owners, but cats are more popular in urban areas, so that's no surprise either.

As you can tell by a map I drew last year, dog-owning states leaned Republican long before McCain was nominated. Massachusetts, by the way, is about the least doggish state in the union.

The Republican Party's fading suburban advantage

My latest Boston Globe column is on the tendency of suburban areas to become more Democratic as they get older and more densely populated. It's accompanied by a map, but it's in glorious black-and-white newsprint, so the version below may be more legible.

Mea culpa, Pauline Kael

Apologies to the late Pauline Kael for using a simplistic version of her "Nixon" quote today in my Boston Globe column. A reader has pointed me to her Wikipedia entry, which has her saying, in an interview after the 1972 election, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."

That's less clueless than "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don't know anybody who voted for him," but it makes the point about geographic political polarization almost as well.

Landslide Nation

This week, my Boston Globe op-ed is about the shrinking number of counties that are truly competitive in presidential races.

Obama's risky electoral strategy

I have a piece in today's Boston Globe on Barack Obama's apparent decision to focus on states where the Democrats made gains in 2004, rather than on the states that put Bill Clinton in the White House in 1992. Unfortunately, the Globe's online version does not include the map I mention; it's reproduced below, along with a bonus map.

Voter bloc-heads

Matthew Ygelsias rightly gets annoyed by poll analysts who say a particular demographic group (almost always in the middle of a continuum) is "key" to an election. As he points out, a vote is worth the same whether it comes from a 20-year-old black guy or a 70-year-old white woman. And if any group is a "swing group," it's the one with the most undecided voters.

Nobody beats Kerry and Patrick

A new poll from Suffolk University and Channel 7 has "someone else" beating US Sen. John Kerry this fall, 51-38. That same entity is ahead of Gov. Deval Patrick, who is up for re-election in 2010, by a 41-39 margin.

Neither man is likely to be panicking yet, given that an early 1994 poll had "someone else" beating US Sen. Ted Kennedy easily, 52-38. Kennedy beat his actual Republican opponent that year (Mitt Romney) by 17 points. 

Getting passionate (sort of) about Sam Nunn

The New Republic blog tracks the pros and cons of Barack Obama naming Sam Nunn the former senator from Georgia (very former -- he retired in 1996) as his running mate. I can see the arguments for naming Nunn to a cabinet or advisory position, but I'm not so sure about his pull as a V-P candidate. The choice would be reminscent of Michael Dukakis picking Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 -- a longtime Washington insider from the South with a long history as a conservative Democrat who nevertheless has shown a willingness to work with more progressive elements of the party. I remember a lot of moderates and conservatives in that year expressing regret that Bentsen wasn't at the top of the ticket (especially after he cleaned Dan Quayle's clock in their debate), but my hunch is that they all voted for George G.W. Bush, since Bentsen reminded them of what they didn't like about Dukakis (Northern self-rightousness, lack of foreign policy credentials, etc.)

I think Bill Clinton had it right in 1992 when he picked Al Gore, who underscored his strengths (Southern roots, youthfulness, centrist views) rather than emphasized his weaknessess. My bet is that Obama will do something similar -- rather than pick an elder statesman in the vain hope of taking the white Southern senior citizen vote away from John McCain.

Electoral College tighter than a deer tick

RealClearPolitics has added an Electoral College map to its dizzying array of charts and tables based on poll results. When it forces itself to assign every state to one or the other candidate, the website comes up with a 272-266 victory for Barack Obama -- with John McCain snatching Michigan and New Hampshire from the states John Kerry won in 2004, and Obama winning Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, and Ohio among the states Kerry lost.

I'm skeptical about that Michigan pick-up for McCain. Electoral-Vote.com has the state leaning Republican, but that's based on a Survey USA poll with an unusually high 22 percent for "other" or "undecided." Given how bad Michigan's economy is, I think it's unlikely that the undecideds will break for the incumbent party, though perhaps McCain's continued call for a gas tax holiday is playing well there (and you can't discount the pro-gun and anti-abortion vote in rural Michigan).

For what it's worth, the only other states on the Electoral-Vote map with an other/undecided vote above 15 percent are Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia -- all mostly rural states often torn between economic liberalism and cultural conservatism. They seem to have a lot of disaffected Bush voters who aren't quite sold on Obama. At the other end of the scale, only 6 percent in Mississippi and North Carolina are not assigned to either major candidate.

Obama's home court advantage

The New York Times has an illuminating, if inelegant, map showing where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton received their biggest popular vote margins during the primary season. Key fact: "Mr. Obama carried Cook County, Ill., by 429,000 votes, a figure that is about the same size as his overall lead in the popular vote" (which doesn't include the nonbinding primaries in Florida and Michigan).

This may be one case in which a candidate's residence was the deciding factor in an election -- for if there is one state that should favor the establishment candidate, especially one with a slightly more centrist platform, a Southern background, and an emphasis on elbows-out pragmatism rather than soft-spoken idealism, Illinois should be it. This is the state where incumbent Jimmy Carter annihilated challenger Ted Kennedy in 1980, labor union favorite Walter Mondale beat "new ideas" candidate Gary Hart in 1984, favorite son Paul Simon easily beat "wine track" candidate Michael Dukakis and insurgent Jesse Jackson in 1988, and Bill Clinton crushed the post-graduate favorites Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown in 1992. Against practically anyone else, Illinois should have been a gimme for Hillary Clinton, with enough popular votes and delegates to put her in the national lead.

Of course, Clinton's home base of New York would probably have been more favorable toward Obama had she not run, but it would not have been an easy victory for him.

Montana and South Dakota primary results

The blog Cogitamus has good maps on the results from the Montana and South Dakota primaries, which had suprisingly different results -- an easy win for Obama in the former and almost as big a win for Clinton in the latter. One explanation seems to be a longer history of Clinton appearances in South Dakota, going back to Bill's presidency.

Montana is intriguing in that Clinton won the only two reliably blue counties in the state (Silver Bow and Deer Lodge). That could mean that Obama doesn't have much chance of winning Montana in November (if he has a tough time winning over Clinton supporters in the places where he has to have big margins), or that he'll be unusually strong in Montana for a Democrat (if he can keep the blue counties and capitalize on his primary-election appeal in rural areas).

Or, as Brendan Nyhan and others insist, primary results have little to no predictive value when it comes to the general election.

Kerry Murphy Clinton?

There are lots of long newspaper stories today on how Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination, including a good analysis by Susan Milligan in the Boston Globe (subhead: "Campaign wasted momentum, money, analysts say") that ends with this extraordinary quote by Steve Rabinowitz ("a veteran of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign who was sympathetic to Hillary Clinton's candidacy"):

"I couldn't help thinking about the irony that she had become the establishment candidate. All kinds of women of her generation still can't believe it."

It seems hard to believe that it's hard to believe that the wife of an ex-president could be the establishment candidate. (Who's better qualified?) She could have been the insurgent candidate if there had been a military coup in the United States and the resistance had chosen, for partly symbolic reasons, to rally around the wife of a democratically elected president, but I can't think of too many other situations in which Clinton could have been "anti-establishment." (Maybe if she had divorced Bill and then run as a Republican...)

One point I haven't seen in the post-mortems is that Clinton never gave a succinct description of how her administration would differ from the previous Democratic administration -- that is, her husband's. There was some muddled rhetoric about how she wouldn't have signed the NAFTA treaty as written, but I don't recall her talking much about how she would change any of the priorities or policy directions of the first Clinton administration. Would she have spent more on infrastructure and social services than Bill did, as opposed to running up budget surpluses that could then be turned into tax cuts by the next Republican president? Would she pay more attention to environmental issues than Bill did? Would she follow his lead on expanding the War on Drugs now that terrorism is more of a concern?

It's not at all unusual to signal that you would have different goals than a predecessor from the same party. George H.W. Bush did it by promising a "kinder, gentler" administration -- the implicit point of comparison being Ronald Reagan's "government is the problem" regime. The point wasn't to trash Reagan but to assure voters that he was independent and forward-looking.

Coincidentally or not, this was also something that the first serious female candidate for governor of Massachusetts failed to do in 2006. Kerry Murphy Healey seemed determined not to say anything at all negative about Mitt Romney, the fellow Republican who had picked her as a running mate in 2002 and was now leaving the governor's office. By that point, Romney was seen as detached from the state, a disappointment in terms of his promises to boost economic development, and out of sync with the state on cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage. But Healey never explained how her administration would be different. Instead, she focused her TV commercials and debate performances on how much of a risk it would be to elect the charismatic but arguably less policy-oriented Deval Patrick -- who happened to be the first black gubernatorial nominee from a major party.

 

Will the Electoral College matter? Part II.

See previous post for ways that Obama might easily win.

Factors that could lead to an easy McCain win:

1.) A run to the middle. McCain has repeatedly emphasized his conservative credentials since he fell short of winning the Republican nomination in 2000, and conventional wisdom is that he still needs to nail down support on the right. But if he concludes that cultural conservatives have nowhere else to go (the Libertarians' Bob Barr being a flawed alternative), he could make a play for the disaffected Hillary Clinton vote -- probably not by flip-flopping on abortion but by avoiding the issue whenever possible, and perhaps even by picking a pro-choice running mate. Emphasizing that he wants to take action against global warming might also help position McCain as the centrist candidate against a far-left Democrat -- depending on how many policy details the voters demand and McCain supplies.

2.) A collapse by Obama in the red states. One reason that Obama is tied or narrowly ahead of McCain in national polls is that he's running ahead of John Kerry's performance in some heavily Republican states (among them Indiana, South Carolina, and Nebraska) where he had strong support in Democratic primaries. But it's conceivable that his support will melt away once Obama is transformed from Hillary Clinton's reformist opponent to John McCain's liberal opponent. If McCain doesn't have to fight for these states after all, he may be able to turn his attention to snatching blue states away from Obama and adding a cushion to George W. Bush's 2004 electoral college victory.

3.) Coolness and deftness in the face of a foreign-policy crisis. A calm, reasonable response by McCain to some unexpected event between now and November would have the double advantage of making Obama seem like too much of a risk in the White House and dispelling rumors that McCain is too hot-headed to serve as commander-in-chief.

4.) An aversion to "historic" change. I don't think many people, in 2008, are lying to pollsters when they say they're intending to vote for a black man, but I do suspect that some voters had a last-minute change of heart in the primaries and switched to Clinton. One danger for Obama is that Americans are generally conservative, not always in the ideological sense but in the sense of voting for incumbents, candidates with familiar names, etc. And for those seeking basic help from the government (keep Social Security going, keep gas prices down), there may be a suspicion that the symbolism of electing  the first black president would co-opt their own, more concrete demands of government. If "being the first" is seen as the primary reason for Obama's candidacy by most people on Election Day, he probably won't carry more than a handful of states.

5.) Fox News and conservative radio. Obama may bring new voters to the polls through e-mails and ringtones, but the GOP still has a powerful get-out-the-vote machine through its media outlets. It also has the ability to amplify attacks on Obama and put him on the defensive, while the Democrats' favored media outlets (such as blogs) do not yet have the ability to control the agenda of the mainstream media. (Remember ABC's infamous Democratic debate in Philadelphia...) By themselves, the right-leaning media probably do not have the ability to ensure a McCain victory in a close election. But if McCain can grab the lead, Fox and friends may be able to add a few points to McCain's victory margin (perhaps by putting Obama on the defensive and dampening the enthusiasm of first-time voters).

   

Will the Electoral College even matter?

It's fun to check in on the latest electoral vote projections, all of which show a close race between Barack Obama and John McCain (see Electoral-Vote.com and FiveThirtyEight.com). But the odds are good that the Electoral College will be a moot point, and that someone will win the popular vote by enough to avoid a "it all comes down to Florida (or Ohio)" scenario. That's what happened in the five elections from 1980 through 1996; having two tight races in a row, as we did in 2000 and 2004, is unusual, and a third one would be quite extraordinary. I wouldn't bet against the extraordinary, but there are a few scenarios that could turn this year's match-up into an electoral vote landslide. I'll start with Obama and follow up with a post on what could give McCain a runaway lead.

Factors that could lead to an easy Obama win:

1.) A smooth reconciliation with Hillary Clinton supporters. For a lot of Democrats and independents, Obama is still seen as the opponent of Hillary Clinton, not John McCain, and they may not be inclined to choose his name in any poll, even if it pits him against Lyndon LaRouche. If enough Clinton supporters drift to Obama, the game may be over early.

2.) Horrible economic news. The weak economy already favors the Democrats, but McCain may seem like enough of a change (and Obama as too much of a change) to give the Republicans a chance of keeping the White House. If things get worse over the next few months (rising inflation, unexpected job losses, etc.), doubts about Obama may be swept aside by the desire to punish the ruling party.

3.) Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr. The Libertarians have never hit 2 percent of the national vote, but Barr is perhaps their most credible candidate of the past 40 years. He's unlikely to hit the heights of Ross Perot, but if he gets 3 or 4 percent, he could tip a few red states (Montana, Barr's native Georgia) to Obama that Obama doesn't necessarily need.

4.) The debates and campaigning style. Obama wasn't able to outshine Hillary Clinton in the primary debates, thanks to her quick-wittedness and command of policy details. But McCain has not been a strong debater, instead excelling at town meetings and informal Q&A sessions. Obama's skills as an orator may be more of an asset than they have been during the past few months, particularly if he gets under McCain's skin (and the Arizona senator showed flashes of nastiness in his encounters with Mitt Romney et al.) or is able to portray McCain as too conservative for today's electorate.

5.) Obama's get-out-the-vote efforts. Obama has proved skeptics wrong by bringing out young and first-time voters in the Democratic primaries (and by compiling a massive database of financial contributors). This hasn't been a silver bullet; huge turnouts in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania apparently cemented wins for Clinton rather than cause upset wins for Obama. But the general election may be a different matter, since the Democratic Party has built wide leads among younger voters. Getting them to the polls may give Obama a couple of points in states all over the map -- if he's able to incorporate the Hillary Clinton faction among first-time voters, which brings us right back to the first point.

Maps: Primary votes as % of general election votes

While we wait for tonight's returns from the final two Democratic primaries, in Montana and South Dakota, here are a few maps that suggest the strengths and weaknesses of Barack Obama in states thAt have already held primaries. (Caucus states, among them Alaska and Hawaii, are not included because they attract far fewer voters and are not really comparable to general elections.)

The first map compares his primary vote to all votes cast in the 2004 general election. The darkest blue areas are where he has already attracted, in the primaries, more than 50 percent of the votes cast in November 2004. These areas represent his bedrock support: majority-black counties across the South and pockets of highly educated professionals mostly in the North. The map suggests, to no one's surprise, that Obama already has the District of Columbia and Vermont in the bag. Mississippi is not so easily won, as Obama's strength is mostly in lightly populated counties.

The second map shows how much progress Obama has already made toward getting the same number of votes that John Kerry won in the 2004 election. In most of the country, he seems most of the way there, but the Appalachian region is a glaring exception. The swing states of Ohio and Virginia are of particular concern: Even if Obama outpaces Kerry in the northern parts of those states, he could be undone by his inability to win over Appalachian residents who were perfectly willing to vote for "liberal elitist" Kerry.

But if supporters of Obama and Hillary Clinton unite, the Democrats could have a sizable advantage in November. As our last map shows, the total votes cast in Democratic primaries this year would be more than enough to win in most counties -- if the turnout were the same as in 2004. The state of Indiana is particularly startling on this map. It hasn't voted for a Democrat since 1964, but the combined vote for Obama and Clinton (nearly 1.3 million) would have been enough for an clear victory in 2004 (when about 2.5 million people voted). Of course, the Indiana primary turnout may have skewed by the fact that the Republican race had long been settled by that late date -- and maybe by Rush Limbaugh's exhortation for Republicans to cause mischief by voting in the other party's contest. (FYI: New York's light color on this map is at least partially attributable to the the fact that its Democratic primary was limited to registered Democrats; most other states had "open" primaries that also attracted independents.

Is Ferraro helping to lay the groundwork for Hillary Clinton's 2012 campaign?

In today's Boston Globe, former Democratic vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro proposes a formal study on whether sexism hurt Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign:

...a group of women - from corporate executives to academics to members of the media - have requested that the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University and others conduct a study, which we will pay for if necessary, to determine three things.

First, whether either the Clinton or Obama campaign engaged in sexism and racism; second, whether the media treated Clinton fairly or unfairly; and third whether certain members of the media crossed an ethical line when they changed the definition of journalist from reporter and commentator to strategist and promoter of a candidate. And if they did to suggest ethical guidelines which the industry might adopt.

A report that partially or wholly validates Ferraro's charges (and how could any study group dismiss them totally?) could be used to promote the argument that the nomination was "stolen" from Clinton this year and that she has a claim on the nomination in 2012 (an idea that would be dimmed, but not completely extinguished, if Barack Obama wins the general election this year).

But Ferraro's idea to formally charge the media with "ethical" violations does come close to charging voters themselves with behaving unethically (if they consciously followed the lead of the sexist media) or behaving stupidly (if they blindly followed that lead). Sounds like elitist reasoning to me.

I'm also unclear on the supposed ethical line between "commentator" and "promoter of a candidate." If the first can't also be the second, doesn't that mean that most talking heads and bloggers can no longer be considered journalists? Ferraro, probably wisely, does not give any examples of "ethical guidelines" that journalists should adopt to solve the problem of how "society can allow sexism to impact a woman's candidacy to deny her the presidency."

Complete county-by-county primary results (so far)

For real election obsessives, I've posted an Excel spreadsheet with complete primary results so far:

Download 2008primariesbycountyasofMay27.xls (1181.5K)

Not surprisingly, it is a very large file and may take a while to download. I will be posting maps from the data after the final primaries, in Montana and South Dakota on June 3. Disclaimers below:

NOTE: The purpose of this spreadsheet is to show geographical patterns in support for specific presidential candidates. For that reason, all popular vote data is included, and primary results are included for states that hold both primaries and caucuses -- even when those primaries are not used to award national convention delegates. This inclusion should not be interpreted as an argument for using these primaries as the means for determining a party's presidential nominee. On the Democratic side this chart includes results from the Florida and Michigan primaries, but those early primaries were not sanctioned by the national party (and Barack Obama was not on the ballot in Michigan) and thus did not count toward the awarding of delegates. This chart includes only primary results from Texas, but delegates from that state were awarded in accordance with the results of both the primary (which Hillary Clinton won) and caucuses held on the same day (which Obama won). This chart includes results from nonbinding primaries in Nebraska and Washington, but delegates from those states were awarded in accordance with the results of earlier caucuses. (In both states, Obama won both the caucuses and primaries, but won the latter by smaller percentage-point margins.) Finally, popular votes from the Iowa and Maine Democratic caucuses are estimates based on each county's awarding of delegates to statewide Democratic conventions.

SECOND NOTE: You may have noticed that I flagged “Marengo County, Alabama” by putting “NA” in the column that compares votes cast in the Democratic and Republican primaries. That’s because I am certain that the 6,175 votes recorded for Mike Huckabee is impossibly high, given the overwhelming Democratic bent of the county. But the state of Alabama has not corrected this and probably never will. There are always errors like this (someone probably put an extra digit in a handwritten sheet given to the state) that aren’t corrected unless they would significantly change the outcome of the race, and every state has a different level of carefulness in these matters. I will try to catch anything unusual like this, but it's inevitable that there will be (hopefully very slight) errors at the county level.

"10 Regions" primary totals after Kentucky and Oregon

I've included the unofficial returns from Kentucky and Oregon, and Barack Obama has now narrowly won Frontier, his fifth region in our 10 Political Regions model. His strongest region remains the South Coast, while Hillary Clinton's strongest region is Cumberland (which includes most of the almost-all-white Appalachian area that has been getting so much attention in recent weeks).

Obama is now ahead in the national popular vote by 160,000 votes if you don't count Michigan (where he wasn't on the ballot and both candidates pledged not to campaign), and Clinton is ahead by 168,000 votes if you do count Michigan. (Arguably, Obama's strength is understated in both cases because he did exceptionally well in caucus states, where the reported popular vote totals are much lower than in primary states.)

The recent primary results also reinforced the pattern by which Clinton does best in counties where George W. Bush significantly increased his share of the vote from 2000 to 2004 (perhaps Democratic voters in those counties overestimate Republican strength nationwide) and Obama does best in counties where Bush lost ground between 2000 and 2004 (perhaps those voters overestimate how easy it will be for the Democrats to win this year). The former category includes much of Kentucky, where Clinton won yesterday; the latter category includes a big chunk of Oregon, where Obama won.

What about Snowe?

Survey USA has released 17 different polls on how well John McCain and Barack Obama would do in Pennsylvania with different running mates. Not surprisingly, Obama does best when paired with the high-name-recognition John Edwards and with Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. The oddest questions involve a scenario with Obama picking a Republican, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, as his running mate (and running pretty much evenly with McCain).

As long as we're entertaining the possibility of a bipartisan ticket, am I crazy to speculate about Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe? She's a woman with 30 years in Congress, has a lot of foreign policy experience (including a stint on the Select Committee on Intelligence), has always been one of the most liberal Republicans in Congress (and is pro-choice), and might be willing to give up a seat in a US Senate likely to be controlled by Democrats for the foreseeable future. If Obama does pick a woman as a running mate, I'd bet on Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, but unless I'm missing some big disadvantage (like a history of poor debate performances) Snowe doesn't seem any less likely than Hegel.

Is Menino sticking out his neck for Hillary?

The Boston Globe's Political Intelligence blog is reporting today that nearly 50 Massachusetts supporters of the pro-choice group NARAL have signed a letter asking that the organization retract its recent endorsement of Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. "We believe NARAL’s endorsement was not only the wrong one, but entirely premature," the letter states, according to the Globe.

The signers include state Senate President Therese Murray and House Speaker Sal DiMasi, but perhaps the most notable name is Tom Menino, the mayor of Boston. Menino has been a strong Clinton supporter since before the Massachusetts primary in February, but he also has a long history of advocating for more federal aid to go to cities like Boston. ("We need a partnership with the federal government to secure our cities — and that means financial assistance," he said as president of the US Conference of Mayors in 2003.) If Obama is nominated (which seems more than probable) and then elected president, Menino's late stand for Clinton may make things awkward when the mayor goes to Washington to lobby for funds.

Menino may be betting that Obama is a forgiving sort, or he may feel it's more important to maintain relations with Murray and DiMasi, who can influence any state aid to Boston. Or, more simply, he really thinks it's a mistake not to nominate Clinton.

State of the Race: May 15

The Boston Phoenix's Steven Stark says that if the presidential election were held today, Barack Obama and John McCain would each get 269 electoral votes, throwing the election into the House of Representatives. Stark arrives at this conclusion by replicating the 2000 election map and shifting just one state, moving Colorado to the Democrats.

The website FiveThirtyEight.com also shows a virtually tied race at this point. They give McCain an impossible 269.3 electoral votes through some formula too complicated to describe here. But their state-by-state predictions differ from Stark's only by giving Nevada to Obama.

In the chart below (download here), I took FiveThirtyEight.com's predicted breakdown of the two-candidate vote (based on both recent polls and on the past accuracy of polls in each state) and applied it to the vote turnout of 2004 to see how the popular tally might end up. Right now, it shows Obama narrowly losing the popular vote even while narrowly winning the Electoral College. This situation probably won't hold in November: Turnout will almost certainly be up, and I think Obama will win heavily Democratic states such as Massachusetts and New York by a bigger margin than polls now indicate. But the possibility of another split in the popular vote and Electoral College remains a real possibility.

Obama's rural peaks and valleys

As other bloggers have noted (see Al Giordano), Barack Obama's weakness among rural voters seems most pronounced along the Appalachian Mountains, though the map below suggests that the anti-Obama region extends farther west to take in Oklahoma and northern Texas.

West Virginia, which went overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton last week, seems to represent the absolute nadir of rural support for Obama; southern Ohio wasn't much more hospitable. But notice that he was more competitive in the rural counties of Indiana and Missouri, which accounts for the tight races in those states' primaries. And Obama's strong showings in the West and upper Midwest so far means that he can probably count on victories in the Montana, Oregon, and South Dakota primaries. Whether he can be competitive in a state like Montana in the general election is another question.

Elitist Republicans, rube Democrats

Over the past few decades, Democratic presidential candidates have done increasingly well in urban areas and Republicans have strengthened their hold over rural areas. The map below shows the major exceptions to this trend in 2004, showing which counties were both significantly more urban and more Republican than the national average, or more rural and more Democratic.

Most of the rural Democratic counties in the South are majority African-American, while a good number of the rural Democratic counties in the West are mostly Hispanic or American Indian (but there are also several resort areas in California, Colorado, and Idaho). White rural Democrats are concentrated in New England and the upper Midwest. In order for the Democrats to win in November, they probably need to carry at least a few more heavily rural counties. Barack Obama may be able to do this in the West and in states like Iowa; he probably can't do much to stop the withering away of white rural Democratic counties in Kentucky and West Virginia.

Conversely, Republican candidate John McCain can't afford to lose more urban Republican counties. They still exist in Florida and Texas, but they are few and far between in the Northeast and Midwest.

Elaboration, please: Sexist attacks on Hillary

The Boston Globe's Joan Vennochi has a typically clear-eyed column on the refusal by many of Hillary Clinton's female supporters to concede the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. But one paragraph warrants elaboration:

The final book on the 2008 presidential campaign will record a great deal of gender bias. The Hillary Nutcracker, a product whose name says it all, is one example. The emphasis on Clinton's cackle and depictions of her as a witch are others. Dean and other top Democrats did nothing to discourage blatant sexist attacks, and, for that, they are paying a price with Clinton's female supporters. [Italics added]

There has certainly been sexism in the media's coverage of the Clinton campaign, but have "blatant sexist attacks" come from within the Democratic Party? It would be nice to have an example. What attacks did Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean fail to prevent or repudiate?

Over?

The consensus in the mainstream media is that Hillary Clinton lost any chance for the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday, thanks to a big defeat in North Carolina and only a wafer-thin victory in Indiana. Yesterday's results pretty much mirror the primary season as a whole: Barack Obama's victories have tended to come with wider margins than Clinton's, and that means more delegates for the Illinois senator.

In retrospect, the biggest disappointment for Clinton over the past five months may have been that her win in California, the biggest state to vote on Super Tuesday, didn't make her the prohibitive front-runner. Instead, Obama raised eyebrows with his landslide victories in the Super Tuesday caucuses, including Colorado, Kansas, and Minnesota. As I've noted before, elections are almost always won by the candidate with the fewest geographical "black holes" -- states, counties, or cities where he or she gets absolutely walloped. Obama had a couple of states like that (Arkansas, Oklahoma, Rhode Island), but Clinton had a lot more (including the belt of states from Maryland to Louisiana and most of the Rocky Mountain states).

More analysis to come in the next few weeks...

Update: Democratic primary vote in the 10 regions

 

I've added the Pennsylvania results to the chart showing how Clinton and Obama have fared in our 10 political regions. For the first time, Obama leads in four regions, as his votes in Philadelphia and its suburbs push him to a narrow edge in the Northeast Corridor. And for the first time, Clinton's strongest region is not El Norte, as her sweep across central Pennsylvania makes Cumberland her most reliable base of votes. Note that Clinton has a narrow lead in the popular vote because the Florida and Michigan primaries, while nonbinding, are included here.

No exit (or, the sitcom campaign)

What more to say about Pennsylvania? The Democratic race has become a sitcom, in which all the stock characters -- the sassy grandma, the dumb jock, etc. -- go through crisis after crisis and never change a bit. Last night, as usual, Clinton won the votes of women, older people, Catholics, and voters without a college education, and Obama won among men, younger people, non-whites, and college graduates.

In particular, the age difference seems irresolvable. According to exit polls at CNN, Clinton won the over-60 vote in Pennsylvania by a ratio of 62-38, while Obama won the under-30 vote by a ratio of 61-39. In all 28 primaries and caucuses for which CNN has done exit polls, Obama has done better with younger voters, and in 17 states Obama has won the under-30 cohort while losing voters over 60. (In another state, California, he tied Clinton among voters under 30 but lost the senior set by 21 points.) The gap has been smallest in Vermont (where Obama won 64 percent of the younger group and 58 percent of the older group) and Connecticut (58 percent and 50 percent). It's been widest in Iowa (where Obama got 57 percent of the younger group but only 18 percent of older voters against Clinton and John Edwards) and Ohio (61 percent for Obama among younger voters and 28 percent among older voters).

This persistent pattern may spell trouble in November for the Democrats. If Obama is the nominee (still the likelier possibility), he may lose older Democrats to 72-year-old John McCain. If Clinton is the nominee, she may not attract younger voters to the polls and may have problems with independents who don't necessarily share the fondness for the first Clinton administration that older Democrats seem to have.

Does it even matter who the Democrats nominate?

John Judis has a New Republic piece warning that Barack Obama will have a very tough time winning the "white working class vote" in November:

Obama comes from a modest background and has tried to appeal as a candidate of both Harvard Law School and Chicago's Back-of-the-Yards, where he organized laid-off steel workers, but he hasn't been able to pull it off. His manner, his tenor, and his diction are Harvard Law, and when he starts dropping his 'g's," he sounds strained. And Obama is too young, and lacks the stature, to appear as a Franklin Roosevelt-style father figure.

One response is that economic conditions trump all of these character issues anyway (see an argument from 2004). And saying that Obama (or Hillary Clinton) "lacks the stature" of Franklin Roosevelt is circular logic, since the indisputably elitist Roosevelt didn't get his stature until he was elected president, undoubtedly due to economic conditions.

There's also the question of whether the white working-class vote is static in its importance. John Kerry, mocked for being even further out of touch with salt-of-the-earth voters (windsurfing, ordering Swiss cheese on his Philly cheesesteak, etc.) came within 2.5 points of winning in 2004. And if the country is steadily becoming more educated and urban, won't there come a time when a candidate who does well among well-educated and urban voters be at an advantage? (One problem this year for Democrats, however, is that John McCain is stronger than your typical Republican among these voters.)

Judis also warns that Obama isn't in the same league as our last Democratic president:

Sometimes, voters will think a candidate cares about them because they think he is "one of them." Bill Clinton, of course, was a genius at this. He could be the candidate of Hope, Arkansas, and Yale Law School.

But praise for Bill Clinton's political skills usually leave out this data point, from Real Clear Politics:

Exit polls actually show that in 1992 Bill Clinton won essentially the same portion of white men as Michael Dukakis in 1988. It was Ross Perot who siphoned off these men, as well as a lesser portion of white women, and undid George H.W. Bush.

Was Clinton a genius because he somehow maneuvered Perot into running for president?

Don't make these voters angry

I'm working on some charts and maps showing which counties have a consistent bias for or against the incumbent party in presidential elections, which may take a little while. As a sneak preview, here are the major counties with the biggest vote swings in the last three elections where the incumbent party lost. In 1980, Jimmy Carter's slide in Worcester, Massachusetts, was exacerbated by the presence of John Anderson on the ballot; in 1992, the third-party candidacy of Texan Ross Perot accelerated the first President Bush's drop in the Lone Star state; and in 2000, the second George Bush did particularly well in Texas. Overall, though, anti-incumbent (angry? bitter?) counties seem most common in Florida, Texas, and the West. Are they a good predictor as to how well the Democrats will do this fall?

Biggest swings against incumbent party among counties casting at least 100,000 votes

1980: Clark (Las Vegas), Nevada. Drop of 19 points for Jimmy Carter (from 50% to 31%).
Worcester, Massachusetts. Drop of 18 points (from 60% to 42%).
Miami-Dade, Florida. Drop of 18 points (from 58% to 40%).

Biggest swings against incumbent party among counties casting at least 100,000 votes

1992: Collin (suburban Dallas), Texas. Drop of 27 points for George H.W. Bush (from 74% to 47%).
Brevard (Melbourne), Florida. Drop of 27 points (from 70% to 43%).
Denton (suburban Dallas), Texas. Drop of 26 points (from 68% to 42%).

Biggest swings against incumbent party among counties casting at least 100,000 votes

2000: Travis (Austin), Texas. Drop of 11 points from Bill Clinton to Al Gore (from 52% to 42%).
Salt Lake, Utah. Drop of 7 points (from 42% to 35%).
Hidalgo (Mexican border), Texas. Drop of 6 points (from 67% to 61%).

Sen. Clinton, Massachusetts has already voted

"Why is Barack Obama smiling?" I wondered. But I quickly realized that the 8-1/2 inch x 12 glossy in my mailbox wasn't from the Illinois senator. It was a stinging indictment of the Democratic presidential contender's Senate voting record, courtesy of this New York colleague.

Fair enough. But today's question, sports fans, is: Why is Hillary Clinton spending her precious campaign dollars on mailings in a state that has already voted?

Sen Clinton, I'd love to weigh in on the upcoming Pennsylvania contest, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave that to Mom. Or has the Clinton campaign decided on the head-scratching tactic of targeting PA natives living in states that have already voted, who presumably are so enthused by Clinton's candidacy that they'll talk her up (and bad-mouth Obama) to friends and family back home? No, probably not.

Or wait, better yet, here's a plan: Contact heaps o' voters who have already cast their ballots. They'll be so moved by the message, nay, by the outrageousness of it all, that they'll contact loved ones and anyone else in the states that have yet to vote. The invective about Obama's voting habits will flow as will votes into Hillary's column...and...and...

Naw, can't be that either. So what's the strategy here?

The lay of the land in Florida's Gold Coast

After looking at the map of the 10 States of American Politics, Brian wrote:

A friend suggested Broward County (FL) be included with Northeast Corridor, just as Miami-Dade was put with El Norte rather than with South Coast. Was this ever considered? Outside the Everglades, the county's density is over 4,000, voting tends to be heavily Democratic, and most residents are relocated from the Northeast Corridor.

That's a good point, and I did consider putting Broward with the Northeast Corridor, but I didn't want to make the map too complicated, and I wanted to take into account a longer time frame than the past two or three elections. As the chart below shows, Broward County, like the Northeast Corridor , has trended Democratic beginning in 1992. But Broward was closer to the South Coast during the 1960s through the 1980s -- swinging toward Richard Nixon in 1968, back to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, and then again to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980. And South Coast, in contrast to Southern Inland, now looks like a swing region. If Broward gives the Democratic nominee a New York City-style landslide this fall while the South Coast goes Republican, I may change its region, but I think it's possible John McCain will do measurably better in Fort Lauderdale than on Long Island.

Miami-Dade County really is one of a kind. Its swing toward the GOP during the Reagan years, and the Republican Party's plunge in the 1990s, was a far more extreme version of what happened in the United States as a whole. It doesn't fit exactly in any region, but its imitation of a long-necked bird puts it closest to the South Coast and El Norte. But the fact that it's been solidly, if unspectacularly, Democratic in the last few elections makes it a better fit with El Norte.

And as proof that the three "Gold Coast" counties of Florida have distinctive personalities, here is how they compare with each other.

Finally, here are the stats reflected in the charts above.

Where the political earth moved in 1976

 

In our journey through recent presidential elections, we come to 1976, the high-water mark for the Democratic Party over the past 40 years and the last time that party won the South. (Go here for explanations of our 10 regions and links to data from other election years.) Georgia's Jimmy Carter won six of our 10 political regions and ran about 18 points ahead of Hubert Humphrey's showing in 1968 -- when Dixiecrat George Wallace ran strongly in the former Confederate states.

The one region where Carter ran worse than Humphrey did was the Upper Coasts, which may have been cool toward a religious Southerner with a rural sensibility. He made improvements in the less populated counties of the region but lost ground in the vote troves of Boston, Hartford, Portland (both Maine and Oregon), San Francisco, and Seattle, and he lost the Humphrey states of Connecticut, Maine, and Washington. As the Republican Party gained strength in the South, the Democrats would grow increasingly reliant on the Upper Coasts, but it would take a while for the party to become dominant there.

Carter's gain was less impressive when compared with 1960, the last competitive race with only two major candidates. He did much better than John F. Kennedy in most of the South, and especially in border states such as Kentucky and Tennessee, but he fell behind in most of the North.

The biggest drop for the Democrats between 1960 and 1976 was in Mega-Chicago, which switched from Kennedy to Republican Gerald Ford. Again, Carter made some gains in rural areas but was weaker than Kennedy in such major cities as Chicago and Detroit. Despite unimpressive showings in Milwaukee and St. Louis, however, he was able to carry Wisconsin and Missouri by doing well in the Southern Inland and Chippewa parts of those states.

Overall, Carter got just over 50 percent of the vote against Ford, thanks to heavy support in the South.

In particular, Carter got 58 percent in the Southern Inland region; no Democrat has one a majority there since Carter headed the party.

Carter racked up his biggest margins against Ford in large cities, following the pattern of all Democrats, but there were more red splotches on the raw-vote map than is usual in a Democratic year. It was Carter's rural popularity that allowed him to narrowly overcome his lack of appeal in major suburban counties.

In Connecticut, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois, the heavy Republican vote in the suburbs kept Carter from winning the electoral votes of those states. But he narrowly carried Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where secondary urban areas (such as Youngstown, Pittsburgh, and Madison) compensated for large Republican counties.

Electoral College compromise?

Reader Peter Porcupine responded to my post about the Electoral College and the possibility of repeating the 2000 election by suggesting an alternative:

There is an intermediate step between the existing system and a popular vote, and several states use it now. It is to apportion electoral college votes according to popular votes within a state. Maine uses this, for instance. It is a viable compromise. It preserves the original purpose of the electoral college - having the interests of rural states preserved against an overwhelming popular vote in urban areas - while apportioning those vote more fairly.

Peter doesn't indicate a preference here on whether to retain the two votes given to each state regardless of population size (that is, reflecting their representation in the Senate), a provision that gives a little extra heft to smaller states. If each state didn't get those extra two votes, Al Gore would have won the 2000 election even with a winner-take-all system. Since Bush won 30 states to Gore's 20, he won 60 bonus votes to Gore's 40; without them, his 271-266