Burnt Orange Report

Andrew,

Amen brother. I have been predicting this scenarion for months. A Dean / Clark ticket is going to kick Bush/Cheny from hear to next Sunday. The Rs know it and are scared shitless.

I read your excellent blog entitled "primary shakeup." While your electoral arguments are well-stated, I don't believe that they are correct. I don't see Dean 2004 running ahead of Gore 2000 in Arkansas. GWB won that handily in 2000 against a Southern candidate with enormous national experience. After 9-11, I don't see Arkansas trending left at all. Quite the contrary, in fact.

As for the overall electoral map, here are the states where Bush and Gore were separated by 5 points or less in 2000.

Gore States (Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin)

Bush States (Florida, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee)

Is there any red state in play where Dean 2004 runs ahead of Gore 2000? Gore is from Tennessee, so not there. As for Florida, given what happened in 2000. Dean could conceivably benefit from absolutely enormous turnout which usually helps Democratic candidates. Everyone will know that their vote could mean the difference in the entire Presidential election. Florida could go counter to national trends for this reason and go for Dean despite the fact that Dean has much less appeal with blacks and elderly Jews than Gore did (Democratic base in Fla) and the fact that the House races in Florida in 2002 were moving more to the Republican side. I don't see any of the other Bush states being in play this time except maybe New Hampshire, which voted for Clinton twice.

As for the Gore states, I see Bush picking up a few of them. There is a very good chance that Bush will take Iowa and New Mexico and a better than average chance that he picks up Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania as well. At first glance I am tempted to put Oregon in this category as well, but Nader got 5% of the vote in Oregon last time, and Dean will get almost all of this vote. Dean also runs stronger than Gore with the Starbucks crowd which you see a lot of in Portland. Oregon tends to be more doveish than the rest of the country as well, so Dean might hold serve here.

Assuming things play out this way and assuming the surprise for Dean in Florida (and I still tend to think Bush will win Florida again), Bush gets 35 more electoral votes than last time, and New Hampshire breaks its string of voting for the winner.

All of this assumes that 9-11 did not cause a hawkish realignment in America. If this is a realignment election, and I think it might be, Bush wipes Dean out--similar to the way in which Nixon went from winning a very close race in 68 to a landslide in 1972 against an anti-war candidate.

One more thing. The things Clark said today on Meet the Press make me think that he will not accept the veep position. It wasn't quite Shermanesque, but it was pretty darn close.

Andrew,

If Kerry comes in well in Iowa, second or close, his poll numbers in New Hampshire will go up and Clark's will not.

The key question is how well he does then In NH and how it is spun whether its "comeback kid" or worse than expected.

Then it's the next round and it's Clark, Kerry and Dean. Though three in race helps Dean.

Marvin,

Your electoral calculations lack nuance. There are red states trending bluer that Gore barely lost like Arizona. Arizona has a Dem governor; it can be blue and New Hampshire is still a possibility.

The hurting Midwest is where to look, Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan are likely to go Dem this time. The last two went for Gore and Ohio was a Democratic mistake in tactics when they withdrew in October; they lost by not much and Bush's economic policies have hurt him there.

I may agree with you about Florida, but if you count all the people who went into the polling booth thinking that their vote would be tallied and not disallowed, Al Gore won it last time not by hundreds but by thousands of votes. But Jeb will again pull every dirty trick he can think of to manipulate Democratic voters off the rolls.

It will be a close election because the base of each party is so anti the other party and it will be the facts on the ground that will determine the outcome.

The Republicans were overconfident last time and may be so again. Do you remember Rove predicted over 320 eletoral votes and/ or a large popular win?

Debra,

Arizona wasn't that close last time around. Bush won by 6 points. The stuff about what Bush's economic policies has done to the midwest is just partisan boilerplate. The policies that really affect the rust belt manufacturing base that you decry are essentially the same free-trade policies followed by the last several administrations of both parties. They have a lot more to do with global economic trends that have very little with Presidential power. The exception was the steel tariff, recently recinded, which was designed to get Bush votes in Pennsylvania and might just work--who knows.

Interesting analysis and commentary from everyone from Andrew down to Debra (who was the last post on the comments before I started typing this).

The only thing I am interested in seeing is how the two tickets, Bush/Cheney and whoever/whoever, will appeal to swing voters. Despite what Karl Rove and Joe Trippi (or those attempting to speak on their behalf) might thing about the irrelevance of swing voters, they do exist in America in 2004. Two years ago in the 2002 elections somewhere around 20% of of those exit polled by VNS split their tickets. Split ticket voting is one of the most basic definitions of a swing voter.

I hardly see how 20% of the voting population polled in 2002 constitutes irrelevant swing voters. While a continuing partisan hardening of the parties and their constituencies might make this theory more plausible down the road in federal elections (say 2012 on), to game this election cycle by ignoring swing voters is a sure-fire loser for the Democratic Party.

On the other hand, there's obviously not enough of a swing voter base to pander solely to the interests of the moderates both inside and outside the party. What is needed? A combined approach, of course.

So far the most promising campaign from a purely electoral strategy is the Dean campaign and their ability to mobilize first time voters and their attention to the party's base, some of which was neglected through the Clinton years. My main concern with the Dean campaign is that they will have to move back and forth across the Democratic spectrum too much during the primaries to have any spatial legitimacy left come time for the general election. While the level of first timer mobilization is very impressive, I do not think it is significant enough to allow the campaign to ignore the ticket splitting moderates that they will need to beat Bush.

On the other hand, the Clark campaign (of which I have been, am, and will continue to be a supporter and volunteer) can't come close to matching the Dean campaign's mobilization of first-timers who have never voted before but it does have a much stronger appeal to moderates both inside and outside the Democratic Party. In our area here in North Texas we've seen a tremendous amount of interest from first-timers of a different sort; fiscally conservative Republicans and moderate Republicans who are giving Dean and Clark (and Edwards) serious consideration as an alternative to the free-spending and ethically ambiguous George W. Bush. There is, in my estimation, a clear preference for Wes Clark in this population.

I began this primary cycle thinking that we might see a showdown for the soul of the party as Andrew mentioned. I no longer think this is the case, but I do believe that whoever wins is going to have to pucker up big-time and kiss lots of ass and make nice with the followers of the candidate(s) who they have run in opposition to down the stretch. In the group of Clark supporters I keep in regular touch with, none of us feel any love or even minimal admiration for Howard Dean and, more to the point, even less for his campaign. I don't know if too many of the Dean folks will even stop to consider that lumping all of his Democratic opponents in with his Republican opponents is not wise at all.

As a strategy it will necessitate a decided move to the center on Dean's part to appease (at the least) the moderate part of the Democratic Party.

I don't think there's much of a chance that any significant numbers of moderate Democrats will vote for Bush, but with a Dean victory without any serious attempt and inclusion and/or reconcilliation could keep a lot of them home on election day, particularly if the economy continues its faux improvement.

Great blog guys!