Ms. Froma Harrop pens a delightful piece?on the dynamics of an Edwards nomination by the Democrats, and her intuition about Edwards’ regional appeal is backed up by my own?findings from just the other day.? Says Froma:
“And what about Edwards? Schaller has long held that Southern candidates can be useful to Democrats, not to collect electoral votes in the South, but to win close races elsewhere. Their rural populism sounds culturally authentic in farm belt Iowa or northern New Hampshire.
“John Kerry had to run around and get a goose hunting license,” Schaller notes. “Edwards did not.”
Edwards was a good running mate for Kerry, Schaller says, because he could help in southwest Ohio, central Missouri or West Virginia. Alabama was never a possibility.”
Exactly.? As I pointed out the other day in my seemingly controversial Rudy v. Edwards piece, Edwards’ regional base?lies not in the traditional Democratic base states of the last ten years (the northeast and the west coast), but in the midwest and the border states.? Nor is Edwards the candidate of the south; Rudy beats him handily in the stretch of states ranging from Louisiana through the Carolinas and Virginia.? But midwestern states like Wisconsin and Iowa, and border states like Missouri, Ohio, and West Virginia, have the real potential to be Edwards country.? Edwards does better in many of these states than he does in California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or New Hampshire.
In my initial post on the subject, I was asked by R4’08 readers how I could put any stock in polls that show a Democratic presidential nominee winning states like Missouri while losing states like Maryland.? I was accused of shilling for my preferred Republican presidential candidate by buying into a set of pie-in-the-sky polls that couldn’t possibly be accurate.? Perhaps my detractors would change their minds if they learned a bit more about electoral history.? Those criticizing me for this analysis, those knocking SurveyUSA’s polling, and those basically implying that they know more about polling than the great Michael Barone, who did a similar analysis on the same set of polls last year, would likely be surprised to learn just how young the red/blue divide actually is.
Before 1996, Republicans?often won states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California during presidential years.? In 1992, Bill Clinton did in fact sweep these northern and west coast states, but the percentage of the vote Clinton received across these regions was very, very close to that received by Dukakis just four years earlier, with the 1988 Bush vote split between Bush and Perot.? In other words, even in 1992, the Dems were still performing quite poorly in much of the industrial north and in the west.? In 1996, the share of the vote going to the Democrats in these northern and western states jumped substantially all across the two regions.? In 2000 and 2004, those Clinton converts continued to cast their ballots for Democratic presidential contenders.? In other words, something happened between 1992 and 1996 that turned lots of northern and western GOP voters into Democratic voters at the presidential level.? Perhaps it was Clinton’s governance as a fiscally prudent, free trading, social liberal — which is what many of the voters in this region are — that turned the tide for the Dems in states that Reagan and Bush 41 won easily in the 1980s.
The point of all of this is to demonstrate that none of us knows what will happen if a Democrat whose ideology is the exact opposite of that of Bill Clinton, i.e., a populist, nationalist, protectionist like John Edwards, were to take the helm of the Democratic Party.? The assumption that just because the Democrats were unbeatable at the presidential level in states like New Jersey and California for the past (gasp!) three elections is as shortsighted as it is hubristic.? And the same goes for states like Missouri and West Virginia.? These states have only been solid red in the past two presidential elections.? And the former certainly wasn’t very red last year.? Isn’t it possible that in a race that doesn’t involve a Republican like Bush and a Democrat like Gore or Kerry that voters in these states may decide to behave a bit differently?? Why am I so unreasonable for suggesting such a thing?
January 4th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
It seems to me that there is a shift in politics, and one that I have been predicting for some time.
I think that a slow, gradual change will come about, and the Republicans will become much more libertarian in ideology (see Rudy) and the Democrats will become much more populist/authoritarian in ideology.
Basically, if you look at the Nolan chart:
we have the Democrats on the left, and the Republicans on the right. I think that the chart will flip clockwise in the next couple of decades, gradually, so the Republicans will be more libertarian, and the Democrats will be more authoritarian.
This fits in with your piece in that Edwards is very authoritarian/populist leaning, and Giuliani is very libertarian leaning. Neither fits fully in the Nolan chart area for populist/authoritarian or libertarian, respectively, but they both represent a gradual change in thought processes.
There is a reason that SoCos haven’t been given much of a voice this go-around. There is a major political shift at work.
January 4th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
http://chriswelsch.hypermart.net/LIECO/2line.jpg
There’s a link I meant to post with the Nolan chart.
January 5th, 2007 at 12:26 am
If Edwards wins the nomination, he’ll be the most fiscally liberal Democratic nominee since Mike Dukakis (Gore was fairly populist too, but in 2000, he was still disguised as Clinton, Term 3). And Rudy would be the most libertarian GOP nominee since Ronald Reagan. I can’t imagine how such a race wouldn’t completely reorganize the electoral topography of the country.
January 5th, 2007 at 12:38 am
I think you’re exactly right, Dave, that an Edwards-Giuliani race would look very different from recent presidential elections. SurveyUSA didn’t just pull their numbers out of a hat. I like Edwards’ chances of winning his party’s nomination better than I like Giuliani’s, though, because Edwards has run this race before and Giuliani has not.
January 5th, 2007 at 10:33 am
And Edwards won’t scare away his party’s core like Giuliani.
January 5th, 2007 at 11:36 am
You’re spot-on about NJ. CA is a much tougher case, though — many of the moderate conservatives who supported Reagan are now living in NV, ID, and AZ.
January 5th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Sean, as a Californian, I can certainly attest that the people who have left my state were more likely to be “red” than those who stayed but. At the same time, California is probably more dependant on free trade than any other state in the US. I would expect that most international trade with Mexico, China, Japan, and possibly India passes through California. And our film industry and high-tech companies are heavily dependant on foreign trade as well.
To be sure, California is far too liberal socially for a so-con candidate to win here, and even a more appealing candidate like Giuliani would be unlikely to flip this state against Obama or Clinton. But if the matchup is Giuliani and Edwards, I could see California suddenly becoming very competitive.
January 5th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
“Reagan was libertarian?”
Now, now. You really have to read more carefully. I never said Reagan was libertarian. I said Rudy’d be the MOST libertarian nominee since Reagan, indicating that Reagan was indeed MORE libertarian than either Bush or Dole when you look at the broad swath of issues in the aggregate.
“Why do you continue to ignore the complete anathema taht Rudy is to conservatives?”
Because I haven’t seen any empirical evidence that this is true. Is it okay if I ignore that which I have no evidence for?
“Clinton performed much better in 96 than 92 becuase a)Bob Dole was an awful candidate”
So was Bush 41 in 1992.
“b)the economy was decent”
This makes no sense at all. By that logic, Clinton as the challenger in 1992 should’ve performed just as well during the bad economy.
“c)the media and the nation had turned against Gingrich and the GOP”
The media is always against the GOP.
And besides, you’re missing the point. The point isn’t simply that Clinton did better in 1996 than in 1992. The point is that in two very distinct regions of the country, there was a very similar percentage of the vote received by the Democratic presidential ticket in the 1980s and 1992 and a very similar, much higher percentage going Dem in 1996, 2000, and 2004. I believe that this took place due to the north and west coast discovering that a certain type of Democrat could be trusted not to destroy the economy. Give them a Democrat that will destroy it, and they’ll be open to alternatives.
January 5th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Abortion isn’t the end-all-be-all issue in determining whether or not someone’s a libertarian, either.
January 5th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
But this quote of Rudy’s certainly helps the case that he’s pretty libertarian:
(my paraphrase)
“The government should do its best to stay out of peoples’ personal lives.”
January 6th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
No, that’s just what any real conservative would say.