This is the fourth part of a series of posts analyzing the swing state Colorado. It will focus on the complex territory that constitutes the Democratic base in Colorado. The last part can be found here.
Democratic Colorado
In American politics, the Democratic base is almost always more complex than the Republican base, a fact which is largely due to complex historical factors. Democrats wield a large and heterogeneous coalition - one which often splinters based on one difference or another. The Republican base is more cohesive.
The same is true for Colorado. Republican Colorado generally consists of rural white Colorado and parts of suburban white Colorado. Democratic Colorado is more difficult to characterize.
A look into President Barack Obama's strongest counties provides some insight:
This is the third part of a series of posts analyzing the swing state Colorado. It will focus on the swing areas in Colorado - the parts that will vote for both Democrats and Republicans. The fourth part can be found here.
Swing Colorado
The swing areas of Colorado lie on the edges of the Democratic base in Colorado, which forms a rough "C" shape (more on this in the next post). They can be mapped as below:
This is the first part of a series of posts analyzing the swing state Colorado. The second part can be found here.
Starting six years ago, a massive Democratic wave swept through the state of Colorado. Starting with the election of former Senator Ken Salazar, the Democratic Party took control of almost every state office there was to take. The results of this transformation are pictured in the table above.
This is the last part of a series of posts analyzing the swing state Virginia, which aims to offer some concluding thoughts. The previous parts can be found starting here.
Conclusions
As a state, Virginia's population has always been located in three metropolitan areas: the Northern Virginia suburbs south of Washington D.C., Richmond and its suburbs, and the communities surrounding Hampton Roads. Together these three places compose more than half of Virginia's electorate:
In all three metropolitan areas, Democrats have been improving their margins.
This is the second part of a series of posts analyzing the swing state Pennsylvania. The next part can be found here.
Like Florida, and unlike Ohio, Pennsylvania's political geography can be divided into three. The industrial southwest is reddening, the populous southeast is bluing, and Pennsyltucky remains, as James Carville memorably described it, "Alabama without the blacks." (Actually, Pennsyltucky is a fair bit less conservative.)
The following section will concentrate on Philadelphia, the region upon which Democrats draw the most votes.
Philadelphia the City
Although cities always vote Democratic, different cities contain different political characteristics. Not all big cities are liberal (see Houston, Phoenix), nor are all liberal cities are big (see San Francisco, Boulder).
Fortunately for Democrats, Philadelphia is both America's sixth largest city and one in which four out of five inhabitants regularly choose the Democrat. It is, moreover, a city which has become bluer for eight straight elections.
Last weekend, I was lucky enough to see the state of the race for myself. I traveled to the heart of Battleground Country. Because Nevada's 5 electoral votes are up for grabs and two Nevada Republicans may lose their House seats this fall, I wanted to do something to help. That's why I packed my bags, took some spare change for my favorite slot machines (NOT!), and made sure my family in Henderson had an extra bed for me to crash on.
I went to Vegas, baby, and I'm giving you the full report on what's happening there!
Yesterday, we looked at the dramatic voter registration shift in Nevada, where Democrats have added far more voters to the rolls than Republicans in all three of the state's congressional districts over the past two years. It occurred to me that we might want to expand this analysis to as many "swing states" as we could.
SEK over at The Edge of the American West has done yeoman's work on this score, keeping tabs on the Democratic gains since the beginning of the year in all states with available data on party registration. Let's take that approach a step further and compare the voter registration changes between today and 2006.
Nearly five years ago, DavidNYC defined a swing state as any state where the vote margin between both sides was ±10%. Let's take David's 2004 list of swing states (and add North Carolina and Arizona, for good measure) and see just how much movement there has been in voter registration in these states since November 2006. Unfortunately, not all of these states have voter registration, or publicly available data covering the last two years, so our list is much shorter than I'd like. But you blog with the stats you have, not the stats you want.
Just as we did yesterday, let's present the data in terms of the margin of each party's voter registration advantage in their respective states, with blue indicating a Democratic registration advantage and red indicating a GOP advantage.
State
2006
2008
Change
Arizona
166,133
110,806
55,327
California
1,291,594
1,809,466
517,872
Colorado
165,423
78,227
87,196
Delaware
67,494
86,573
19,079
Florida
283,856
465,617
181,761
Iowa
18,195
99,014
80,819
Nevada
15,309
76,053
60,744
New Jersey
260,066
652,210
392,144
North Carolina
611,790
743,463
131,673
Oregon
62,351
212,224
149,873
Pennsylvania
599,791
1,111,900
512,109
No doubt a super-charged presidential primary was a big factor in the hard blue turn in many of these states, but that contest only fanned the flames of an already present (and continuing) trend. These are definitely some numbers worth chewing on -- and definitely ones causing heartburn for GOP strategists.
I've included links to my sources below the fold.
Update: I've revised the chart above to include inactive voters in the tallies for Arizona and Nevada, as well as update the Iowa numbers with the new September stats (Dems posted another net gain of 2,500 voters here).
The number following each state is the presidential voting margin in 2004. All of them are around 10% or less, in some cases a lot less. So the first-cut answer to the question posted in the title is that all of these states are swing states, or something like it.
But take a look at this list as well:
Arkansas: Bud Cummins
Arizona: Paul Charlton
California: Carol Lam
New Mexico: David Iglesias
Nevada: Daniel Bogden
Michigan: Margaret Chiara
Washington: John McKay
I'm sure many of these names ring a bell. They're all former US Attorneys who were fired for their refusal to subvert justice in the name of loyalty to the Bush administration. And funny enough, they all ran US Attorneys offices in swing states.
Now, correlation does not prove causation. But when it comes to the Bushies, you can put nothing past them. And we do know that one of the reasons John McKay was fired was because he wouldn't pursue bogus allegations of voter fraud after the very close gubernatorial race in Washington state in 2004. So I could very easily believe that Bushco wanted loyalists in these states in particular so that the GOP could maintain their necessary fiction that Democrats are purveyors of rampant voter fraud.
Fortunately, with aggressive oversight, we can at least hope that the new lackeys Dick Cheney has installed will be scrutinized like hawks, especially when when get close to election day. I know I'll be watching.
Take a look up at the banner on top of this screen, that big green bar. See the name in the title there? Remember that? Well, believe it or not, this site once focused entirely on the presidential swing states. (It was only after the 2004 election that we branched out to other races.)
So, with the next presidential election a mere 677 days away - ie, sooner than your local Best Buy will have Nintendo's Wii back in stock - I thought we might take a look at the swing states in play for 2008. Now, as you know, I'm a big believer in the fifty-state strategy, but as you also know, these things take time. As much as I'd like to believe we'll see an expanded playing field in the next presidential race, I think we all realize that Howard Dean's plan is the work of many years.
Therefore, I'd like to start with a similar approach to the one I took three years ago, one which served us well, I think. Back then, I considered as a swing state any state where the vote margin between both sides was ±10%. (Specifically, where the margin between (Gore + Nader) - (Bush + Buchanan) was ±10%.) This time, it's a little simpler because there were no meaningful third-party candidates in 2004, so I'm just going to look at the Kerry - Bush vote.
In any event, this is the list I wound up with, using the numbers found on Dave Leip's site:
State
EVs
Bush
Kerry
Margin
California
55
44.36%
54.31%
9.95%
Maine
4
44.58%
53.57%
8.99%
Hawaii
4
45.26%
54.01%
8.75%
Delaware
3
45.75%
53.35%
7.60%
Washington
11
45.64%
52.82%
7.18%
New Jersey
15
46.24%
52.92%
6.68%
Oregon
7
47.19%
51.35%
4.16%
Minnesota
10
47.61%
51.09%
3.48%
Michigan
17
47.81%
51.23%
3.42%
Pennsylvania
21
48.42%
50.92%
2.50%
New Hampshire
4
48.87%
50.24%
1.37%
Wisconsin
10
49.32%
49.70%
0.38%
Iowa
7
49.90%
49.23%
-0.67%
New Mexico
5
49.84%
49.05%
-0.79%
Ohio
20
50.81%
48.71%
-2.10%
Nevada
5
50.47%
47.88%
-2.59%
Colorado
9
51.69%
47.02%
-4.67%
Florida
27
52.10%
47.09%
-5.01%
Missouri
11
53.30%
46.10%
-7.20%
Virginia
13
53.68%
45.48%
-8.20%
Arkansas
6
54.31%
44.55%
-9.76%
Twenty-one states in total: twelve blue and nine red. Four states are new to this list (CA, DE, HI, NJ) and five states were dropped from the previous list (AZ, LA, NC, TN & WV - though NC was only included later, when Edwards was added to the ticket).
Obviously, quite a few of these seem pretty implausible candidates for switching - certainly anything from NJ to CA would be a huge shock. Perhaps less so with the bottom three red states on the list, given our recent electoral successes in each - but of course, presidential politics is a whole 'nother ballgame, and we often do well in state and local races in red states while getting crushed on the national level.
So the playing field is, in all likelihood, quite a bit narrower than this list would imply. It's also conceivable that some of the states which are no longer on the list could come into play (in particular, AZ). (By the way, the next closest blue states outside this list IL, CT and MD - if they flip, I'm crunching down on my netroots-issued cyanide capsule.)
Anyhow, which states do you think are most likely to flip - and why? And if your analysis hinges on a particular candidate (or type of candidate) getting nominated for pres or VP, please detail that as well.
