The Southwest Strategy

Following up on my recommendations for the ideological realignment of the Democratic party (see here and here), I want to talk about what the Democrats concrete electoral strategy for presidential elections ought to be.

First of all, the Democrats already have three bases of power, in the northeast, the upper midwest, and the west coast. Unfortunately, two of those three regions have been bleeding electoral votes since the middle of the last century (in 1960, e.g., New York was worth 45 EV, Pennsylvania was worth 32, and Illinois was worth 27). Conversely California has steadily gained electoral votes ever since it first became a state, and if immigration rates are steady, it could well crack 60 electoral votes within a couple of election cycles.

What the Democrats have control of, in other words, is the ancestral base of the Republican party. It's prosperous, self-sufficient, and rich in electoral votes. That ain't a bad start, as many wise men have said before me. Based on this year's EV apportionment, I estimate that any Democratic presidential candidate should be able to win a bare minimum of 211 electoral votes, consisting of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, D.C., Michigan, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii. These are the states that, due to the fracturing of the electorate, even Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale should be able to carry if they somehow head the Democratic ticket again. Kerry won three further states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, which I didn't include in my list of Democratic locks (let's use the terms "blue-lock" and "red-lock" hereafter) because President Bush would have won the first if not for a preternatural GOTV effort in Philadelphia, and because the latter two have been trending Republican recently. Whereas New Hampshire is included because even though it was close, it's been trending towards the Democrats.

So: Step 1 of the electoral strategy is consolidation. The Democratic party apparatuses in all the blue-lock states need to begin right now to turn their states deep, deep blue at all levels of government. The Republicans spend the four years in between elections ensuring that the Republican candidate will carry the red-lock states by 20 points. Democrats can't afford not to do the same thing. Step 1a is a parallel campaign in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, the purple-blue states, to make them into locks. In these states, and neighboring red states like Iowa and Ohio, that effort will require appealing to exurban and rural (but not evangelical) voters. The best way to do that, I think, is to position the party as friendly to gun ownership rights, which means everything from running candidates who (gasp) get NRA endorsements, to advocating symbolic measures that are cognizant of a Constitutional right to bear arms. (More on gun rights in another post; I know how controversial it's going to be.) With all the Kerry states locked down---and again, that doesn't mean running with a high probability of victory, it means running with nothing more than a trivial probability of defeat, we're up to 252 EV. Twenty more shouldn't be too hard to find, right?

Step 2 is expansion into the red states (duh). I think about this process in terms of different tiers, representing the urgency with which the Democrats have to campaign in a particular state. To begin with, perhaps the biggest tactical error of the Kerry campaign was to bank everything on the ability to carry the Gore states plus one of Ohio and Florida, and conceding everything else to the president out of hand. Nevertheless, they have 47 EV between them, and Florida is poised to increase its EV share on the basis of a rising non-Cuban Hispanic (hence Democratic) population. These are the tier 1 states, hands down.

Tier 2, however, is where the long term hopes of the Democratic party lie. Currently between them, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada have 29 EV. That number is sure to grow along with a rapidly growing Hispanic population. Moreover, the majority of voters in these states are right-leaning independents and libertarians. It is the perfect arena for proposing a small-government left-libertarian ideology. Transform the southwest into a fourth Democratic stronghold, and it will be the Democrats who hold the structural upper hand in elections. Doing so will be impossible without the something like the ideological shift I laid out (and this is not just pride of authorship---it's ground-level understanding of regional politics and culture).

The third tier is perhaps the most interesting. At some point in the future, Democrats will be (if they're smart) competitive in some of the former Confederate states. On the one hand, there are states where Democrats were competitive not too long ago---Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana. Those are becoming fading prospects, but might still be within reach if there's a particularly strong swing towards Democrats in a particular election. The better prospects, especially long-term, are Virginia and North Carolina, which are slowly becoming mid-Atlantic (i.e. non-Southern) states. From the Maryland+ area of northern Virginia to the research triangle of North Carolina, there are blue-positive demographic indicators in both states. In the immediate future, I don't expect Democratic candidates to be able to win there...but if they can run aggressively and force the Republicans into rearguard action (as Kerry was forced to do in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, etc.), their chances will be manifestly stronger. Moreover, doing well in those states carries the ancillary benefit of bridging the gap between the Democrats and the so-called heartland, such that strong performances in Virginia and North Carolina will have coattails in terms of future local and national elections in places like Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Missouri, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

Speaking of which, the fourth tier is those states---West Virginia, Missouri, Iowa and Kentucky (West Virginia especially, which voted for Dukakis), where economic populism should have allowed the Democrats to run a lot more strongly than they did. The Thomas Frank proposal is to create economic wedge issues. I'm not sure what those would look like, but if it means protectionism, it's a terrible idea. Much better, and much more decent, is to repackage liberal culture in a way that demonstrates to West Virginians et al. that the Democrats are not inimical to their "moral values." Once again, I think gun-rights libertarianism is the key.

Look back at the tiers. Give Kerry tier 1, and the electoral college score is 299-239 in his favor. Concede tier 1, but capture tier 2, and it's 281-257 (likely to get more lopsided as the population of the southwest increases). Add tier 3 to tier 2 (I don't think tier 3 is winnable without tier 2), and the score becomes 309 to 229, or 355 to 183 if you include Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Hopefully not too long from now, a Democrat will win the Kerry states plus all four tiers of red states. That would yield (according to this year's apportionment) an electoral vote count of 413 to 125, give or take about fifty depending on the completeness of a Dem sweep of those states.

Okay, if you're keeping track, we've just now made through step 2. Step 3 is a process I like to think of as Illinoisization (or Illinois-ization). The point is that Illinois used to be a paradigm battleground state, and it simply isn't any more, because Chicago and the surrounding suburbs go so strongly for the Democrats that they are unbeatable in a statewide race. Let Illinois be the model for all the teetering blue states as well as the target red states (in the correct order of urgency), and let us mimic on a vaster scale the success of the Illinois Democrats in effecting a socio-cultural transformation in their state.

Step 4 is candidate selection. This has been more crucial for the Democrats in recent elections than any of the other steps, largely because they've been skipped. Consider what the Republicans have accomplished with George W. Bush, easily the most feeble and embarrassingly incompetent public speaker to run for president in at least a hundred years---and this is out of a field that includes some real doozies. Bush's weaknesses haven't even mattered because the Republicans have transformed their party into a parliamentary coalition, and they've convinced the majority of voters not to support individual candidates, but rather to vote for the Republican party in toto itself. With the ground game laid by success in the prior steps, candidate selection won't have quite the tactical primacy that it bears today. Even so, there are a few considerations the Democrats should make. First of all, they should not pick a token southern governor. It will look like a naked attempt to cleave away regional support by birthright, because that's exactly what such a campaign would be. Advocating the presidency of Candidate X on the basis of his southern roots is even stupider than advocating the presidency of John Kerry on the basis of his Vietnam experience.

At the same time, let's be a little more careful to choose candidates who can correctly pronounce the names of football stadiums and know the starting lineup of their hometown baseball team. Should that matter? No. Does it? Obviously. I think the ideal states to draft future candidates from are New Jersey, Maryland, Wisconsin, and Illinois. That said, Wesley Clark (of Arkansas) is probably the Dems' best hope for 2008, if he can get his act together as a speaker on the stump. (Did you hear his speech at the Democratic Convention? It was the best one after Obama's and Clinton's, and arguably even better than Clinton's). What Clark has going for him, obviously, is that he's a general. What he has going against him is still that he's a general. The temptation will be omnipresent, as it was for Kerry, to spend all his time talking about his military service. At least in Clark's case, that's very extensive service, and constitutes the whole of his previous career. But I think it will be quite enough for the punditocracy to universally refer to him as "General Clark" in order for him to establish his military credentials in that big red space.

Incidentally, during the Democratic primaries there were rumors circulating on the right-wing of the blogosphere that Clark left the army under dubious circumstances. They died down once he lost the nomination, but you can bet your ass that he'll be smeared if he runs again and gets the nomination. So, assuming he still has presidential aspirations, Clark would be well advised to leak all pertinent information about that right now. He should use surrogates to create a mini-scandal, just so that all of this is aired out and discredited long in advance of the election.