http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2011/10/can-obama-win-not-this-way.html
CAN OBAMA WIN? NOT THIS WAY
With Chris Christie out of the race and Rick Perry struggling, the basic outlines of next year’s election are emerging. It’s going to be Obama versus Mitt Romney or A. N. Other (conservative), and the state of the economy will be the defining issue.
Friday’s announcement that employers created a hundred and three thousand jobs in September, and that the payroll figures for July and August were revised upwards by almost a hundred thousand, is modestly good news for the White House: fears of another downward lurch in G.D.P. and another big round of layoffs are receding.
But that doesn’t mean that things are rosy for Obama—far from it. With the official unemployment rate seemingly stuck at nine per cent, and the unofficial rate, which includes people working part-time involuntarily and those too discouraged to look for employment, still above sixteen per cent, the question facing the President and his advisers remains the same: How do you win reëlection with mass unemployment, widespread alienation from the political process, and a large cadre of white working-class and middle-class voters who appear to have given up on the Democrats in general and Obama in particular?
According to a recent front-page Times story, Obama’s Chicago brain trust has come up with an interesting answer: bypass some of the battleground industrial states, such as Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, where disgruntled white men are ominously thick on the ground, in favor of traditionally Republican states like Colorado, Virginia, and Nevada, where an influx of urban professionals and Hispanics is helping the Democrats. Said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist: “There are a lot of ways for us to get to 270, and it’s not just the traditional map.”
Really, Axe?
Much as it makes a good story to suggest that Obama can ride back to the White House on the shoulders of a Frasier-J. Lo coalition, the electoral math simply doesn’t add up—not yet anyway. One day in the not-too-distant future, a Democratic President may well be elected on the basis of largely bypassing the Midwest, but it won’t be Obama.
To be sure, Axelrod and his colleagues can cite some impressive demographic trends to support their strategy. These developments go back to the late nineteen-eighties, when amidst the ruins of Michael Dukakis’s campaign there were some hopeful signs for Democrats: the gradual move to the left by suburban states like California, Connecticut, and New Jersey; and the rise of the Hispanic vote in places like Florida and Arizona. In 2004, John Judis and Ruy Texeira took these trends and turned them into a provocative and well-researched book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” in which they wrote: “We are witnessing the end of Republican Hegemony.”
After Obama swept to victory in 2008, Judis and Texeira looked like geniuses. But an inspection of the electoral map suggested Obama’s victory represented a more familiar phenomenon: a nationwide turn against an unpopular incumbent party.
Yes, Obama picked up Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, and Virginia—and impressive that was. But he also swept the Midwest, winning Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—states that, taken together, account for a hundred and eleven votes in the Electoral College. Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, and Virginia account for just forty-three.
Making inroads among independents, college-educated yuppies, and minorities in fast-changing Republican states is all well and good for the Democrats. In the long term, it may well be fantastic. But to hold onto the White House next year, Obama also needs to win over, or hold onto, large numbers of more traditional Democrats—the so-called “Reagan Democrats,” whose economic and cultural concerns were articulated by Stan Greenberg, one of President Clinton’s pollsters, in his famous study of voters in Macomb County, Michigan (pdf).
If you doubt this, look at the latest 2012 electoral map from Real Clear Politics, which divides the states into five categories: Likely Obama, Leans to Obama, Toss-ups, Leans G.O.P.. and Likely G.O.P. To make things simpler, let’s combine the “Likely” and “Leans” categories.
Likely Obama/Leaning Obama: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Washington DC. Total electoral votes: 201.
Likely GOP/Leaning GOP: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming. Total electoral votes: 191.
Toss-ups: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin. Total electoral votes: 146.
Now, let’s try and usher Obama back to the White House on the basis of the Axelrod strategy. For this purpose, I’ll assume the President fares poorly in the Midwest (setting aside his home state of Illinois), but pretty well elsewhere. So let’s say he loses Ohio and Wisconsin, where he is polling poorly, but holds onto Virginia and North Carolina, two of his big wins in 2008. In terms of the Electoral College, these results offset each other: Ohio and Wisconsin together have 28 votes, and so do Virginia and North Carolina.
This gets Obama up to 229 votes, leaving him needing just 41 for victory, and it leaves the Republicans with 219. Now let’s further assume that Hispanics in Las Vegas and yuppies in Boulder and Denver push the President across the line in Nevada and Colorado, snagging him 15 more Electoral College votes. Now, he’s up to 244 and needs just another 26 for victory. Is he not home free?
If he were in better shape in Florida, which has 29 Electoral College votes, he would be. But the latest Quinnipiac poll shows that fifty-seven per cent of Floridians disapprove of the job Obama is doing, versus just thirty nine per cent who approve—the President’s worst ranking in any state that Quinnipiac has surveyed. Some people I have spoken to say Florida is virtually a lost cause for the Democrats, especially if Senator Marco Rubio, the local Tea Party darling, is on the Republican ticket as a candidate for Vice-President. So, I’ll give Florida 29 Electoral College votes to the Republicans, and citing history and Obama’s poor poll ratings, I’ll also add Iowa (6) and New Hampshire (4) to the G.O.P. column.
Obama now has 244 votes, and the G.O.P. candidate has 258. What states are left?
Just two of them: Michigan, with 16 electoral votes, and Pennsylvania, with 20. In order to reach 270 votes, Obama has to win them both. (He also has to hold onto his home state of Illinois, where his approval rating has just dipped below fifty per cent.)
It’s the same old story, with the election being decided in the big industrial states. Are there ways around this? Sure there are. But most of them depend on Obama turning things around in Florida, which seems unlikely. And recall, I’m also assuming here that Obama once again runs the table in Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, and Virginia. That may happen, but I wouldn’t wager heavily on it.
In closing, let me stress that none of this means Obama can’t get reëlected.
Depending on what happens to the economy, the outcome of the Republican primaries, and his own performance on the stump, he still has a decent shot at it. (Ladbrokes, the British bookmaker, make him the even money favorite to be the next President. Mitt Romney is the five-to-two second favorite.)
The point isn’t that Obama won’t win but that in order to do so he will have to follow the time-honored Democratic route of rampaging around the Great Lakes and squeezing home in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It’s also not as if he doesn’t have anything to say to voters in these areas. With his rescue of the auto industry, he can claim to have saved many thousands of jobs in the Midwest, for example. But given his lowly poll ratings in many of these states, it’s going to be a challenge.
