Burnt Orange Report

Back in Doña Ana County... And some Post-Election Thoughts

By Byron LaMasters

After a couple-of-day hiatus of trying to ignore the news and the blogosphere, I crawled my way back here. I was cleaning my apartment this afternoon, and managed to finally unpack from New Mexico. That got me curious as to how Kerry did in Doña Ana County, where we block walked last weekend...

Kerry won:

PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
JOHN F. KERRY and JOHN EDWARDS Democratic 30602 50.8%
GEORGE W. BUSH and DICK CHENEY Republican 29023 48.2%
DAVID COBB and PATRICIA LaMARCHE Green 96 0.2%
MICHAEL PEROUTKA and DR. CHUCK BALDWIN Constitution 52 0.1%
MICHAEL BADNARIK and RICHARD V. CAMPAGNA Libertarian 125 0.2%
RALPH NADER and PETER MIGUEL CAMEJO Independent 336 0.6%

Kerry's margin this year was slightly smaller than Gore's 2000 margin in the county:

Gore 23,905 51%
Bush 21,261 46%
Nader 1,158 3%

In the rest of the races in Doña Ana County, I don't think that there were any significant changes. Democrats came within a few hundred votes of picking up a couple of state house races, but fell short in both cases. I was disappointed to see the one candidate we had the chance to meet -- challenger for state representative, Jeff Steinborn lose by about 400 votes or 3%.

Overall, it looks as if Bush's 2004 victory in New Mexico is due to the increase of his margins in the rural areas (espeically in the south) of the state. Kerry improved upon Gore's margin in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but Bush improved upon his own margin in many of the rural counties. That offset Kerry's gains and more. It's a similar pattern nationwide. Kerry did even better than Gore in many urban counties, but that margin was offset everywhere by Republicans significantly improving on their rural margins. This ought to teach Democrats several things.

First, the Republicans decided early on in the campaign cycle to wage a campaign centered around base-vote mobilization. Democrats mobilized our urban base like never before, but it wasn't enough. No longer can Democrats pretend that we can always squeeze out a few more votes in our urban counties. We did that -- and while it was enough to carry states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan, it's not enough to get us to 270 electoral votes. Second, given this reality, Democrats must make a decision for 2008. In order to win national elections, we must aggressively court either suburban or rural voters. Both groups require different approaches, and the issues that appeal to one group are often opposed by the other. I tend to think that courting suburban voters is the way to go. That doesn't mean that we abandon rural areas, but that suburban voters offer Democrats the greatest potential.

A cursory look at Texas state representative races suggests that Democrats have great prospects with the suburban vote. Our three (assuming Vo's victory holds up) pick-ups were all in more-or-less suburban districts (Strama, Vo, Liebowitz), whereas our two losses were in more-or-less rural districts (Mabry, Ellis). Looking further into the results also shows a greater rural / suburban divide. Republicans did better than expected throughout east Texas. Max Sandlin -- supposedly even in some polls, got trounced. Meanwhile, Richard Morrison lost by a smaller margin in a suburban district. In races where one party did better than expected, Republicans did better than expected in their challenge to WD-40s (aka rural Democrats). I don't think any Democrats saw Dan Ellis's defeat coming, and I don't think many of us thought that Mark Homer or Jim McReynolds would have come as close to losing as they did. On the other hand Kelly White, Harriet Miller, Katy Hubener and others ran extremely effective campaigns against incumbent Republicans in relatively suburban districts.

My analysis of this election in the coming weeks will likely focus on the question of what went right -- espeically in suburban areas where voters responded to candidates like Mark Strama and Hubert Vo. I'm convinced that their are two keys to Democrats regaining a majority in Texas. First, is maintaining and expanding the Hispanic vote -- a challenge, but I'm confident. Second, however is the suburban vote. Right now, it's solidly Republican in this state. But, that's changing as we saw on Tuesday. By no means am I suggesting that Collin and Williamson county will carry Democrats to victory in 2006. That's lunacy. But make no mistake about it -- Democrats defeated three* Republican incumbents in suburban seats on Tuesday. That's not an accident.