Charney Research article: Barack Obama's New Map

Barack Obama’s New Map

by Craig Charney

Between flaps over bullets in Bosnia and bitterness in Pennsylvania, discussion of the Democratic nominating battle largely overlooks the real strategic difference in the race. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is steering her campaign by the same map Democrats have followed for 16 years, aiming to rally mostly large coastal and Midwestern states. Sen. Barack Obama thinks the map can be redrawn, swinging swaths of red states onto the blue side.

Clinton is struggling to hold the shrinking Eastern industrial states and aging working-class voters, holdovers from the old Democratic coalition. Obama’s new map reflects the appeal to rising social groups — Westerners, nonwhites and the well-educated — of his post-partisan call for unity and change. Their contest is more than a face-off of individuals; it is a confrontation between the Democratic Party’s past and future.

The contrast was obvious in maps published by SurveyUSA last month, after a poll of 600 voters in every state pitting Obama and Clinton against Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.

When the two Democrats’ electoral votes were tallied, they were close: Obama had 280, and Clinton had 276 — both just over the winner’s line (270).

But their maps looked quite different. Clinton’s looked like that of every Democratic nominee since Bill Clinton in 1992, dominated by their party’s coastal enclaves: California and the Northeast and the Midwest. She picked up big states Obama lost — Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida — and some smaller ones: West Virginia and Arkansas, the Clintons’ previous home state. But Obama painted the West bright blue, sweeping all three Pacific Coast states, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa and even reliably Republican North Dakota. He also held most of the Northeast, picked up Virginia and outdid Clinton in the Midwest by taking Michigan.

Obama was hot on McCain’s heels in red states where Clinton was way behind, such as Nebraska, South Dakota, Alaska, North Carolina and even Texas.

Now, after six weeks of Democratic fratricide, Obama and Clinton both run worse against McCain than they did in the SurveyUSA poll, but subsequent polls show similar patterns.

Three factors underpin Obama’s new electoral map: the West, nonwhites and the well-educated. Fast-growing Western states have become a land of opportunity for Democrats. The GOP’s social conservatism and support for Big Business have irked longtime libertarians, non-fundamentalist newcomers and environmentally conscious voters.

This helped swing a region, which until recently was solidly Republican, to the Democrats. For instance, in the Mountain West, where Republicans held every statehouse in 2000, five of eight governors are now Democrats. They and their supporters are a particular sort of Democrat: green and tolerant but also pro-gun and anti-tax.

Obama’s more moderate, less statist emphasis — like his non-compulsory health plan — resonates with these voters, for whom the more conventionally liberal Clinton is radioactve. Indeed, libertarian Republican columnist Ryan Sager writes that, in the West, “Republicans have one hope: Hillary Clinton. Nonwhite voters’ soaring numbers and turnout explain another part of the difference between Obama’s and Clinton’s maps. Extraordinary black support in the SurveyUSA poll gave Virginia to Obama, as when Doug Wilder became the nation’s first black governor two decades ago, and put both Carolinas within his reach, as well.

But massive Latino mobilization — which helped Clinton in the primary — could benefit Obama in the general election. In Texas, Hispanics’ primary turnout jumped fivefold this year compared with 2004 and was overwhelmingly for Democrats, stimulated by Republican anti-immigrant talk. Their support, along with a large black turnout for Obama, nudged Texas just 1 percent away from falling into the Democratic column for the first time since 1976.

Well-educated Americans are the third prop for Obama’s new map. Democratic consultant Mark Gersh said, “The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992.” Obama’s support this year confirmed this.

A recent Gallup poll had Obama leading McCain by 10 points among postgraduate-educated voters and tied among the college-educated, with McCain ahead only among the high-school educated. (The opposite was true for Clinton: The only group where she led McCain was high school-educated voters.) The swelling ranks of the highly educated help explain Obama’s strength in the Northeast, college towns and knowledge-economy centers such as Washington state and Columbus, Ohio.

The differing characters of the candidacies also help define their maps.

Clinton’s is a base-vote campaign, much like those Karl Rove designed for George W. Bush. Her aim is to mobilize party loyalists and just enough extra voters to eke out victory. Her map reflects her reliance on remnants of the Franklin D. Roosevelt coalition, particularly older blue collar voters in large Eastern and industrial states. Yet her dependence on such declining groups, along with her polarizing impact on voters beyond the base, handicaps her against a post partisan like McCain, a master at outreach to independents, marginal Democrats and voters west of the Mississippi.

Obama, in contrast, is a post-partisan candidate who speaks to young millennials and others frustrated with the confrontational, gridlocked politics of the past two decades. Each of his key Democratic groups — Westerners, blacks and Latinos, and the educated — is in the ascendant. Yet Obama’s unifying rhetoric also lets him compete with McCain for the center. Moreover, his appeal across many small states actually helps him, since electoral votes require fewer popular votes in less populous states than in big ones.

Of course, Obama may fail to draw his new map come November. He may be so bruised by Clinton or savaged by the Republicans that he loses his crossover appeal to whites and independents. McCain’s moderate immigration stance may peel away Latinos wary of voting for a black candidate. Or a first-time campaigner’s gaffe, like Obama’s April 11 remark about “bitter” voters clinging to guns and faith, may lead him to a fall.

Obama has shown that Democrats have another way to win, without Clinton/Rove-style trench warfare or sweeping all the big industrial states. In doing this, he has revealed the future of the Democratic Party.

Craig Charney, president of the New York polling firm Charney Research, was senior analyst on President Bill Clinton’s polling team in 1996.

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