Urban Voters, Rural Voters, or the Whole Enchilada
CNN’s website has a map menu that allows you to examine voting patterns for the primaries by state, displaying who won each district within either party. Tinkering around with this toy, I’ve noticed a peculiar trend in the distribution of votes between Clinton and Obama.
Obama tends strongly to win the smaller, less urbanized states, particularly states that reliably go Republican in the general elections. Although Clinton’s tendency to win in large, urbanized states is less clear—because Illinois, New York, Florida, and Michigan must be set aside as special cases—it’s there: she took California, New Jersey, Ohio, and Texas. While polls suggest a Michigan vote would be up for grabs, Clinton is expected to win a proper Florida primary, as well, if either is held. Contrary to this voting trend among states, however, Obama tends to win the large, urban precincts within states, while Clinton tends to take the outlying rural districts.
Pundits aren’t addressing this contradiction. The same talking heads who explained Obama’s wins in Iowa, Idaho, and South Carolina in terms of his appeal to moderate Republican and conservative Democratic swing voters explained Clinton’s wins in Ohio and Texas in terms of her appeal to blue-collar conservative Democrats without batting an eye—which shows how far you should trust pundits to interpret elections.
I can’t claim any particular expertise, but my insight is as good as the other pundits, so let me put forth an alternate explanation for these victories: it’s the money.
Clinton has adopted Rove’s 50% plus 1 strategy, targeting her campaign dollars at what she calculates to be just enough to win. Where those dollars were spent, Clinton has scored victories, albeit by narrow margins in many cases. Areas she wrote off turned sharply towards Obama, who has adopted Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.
I take two lessons from this observation. First, anyone who argues that money doesn’t determine elections is out of touch with political reality. Second, that Dean’s strategy is the way to go. Clinton started with 100% name recognition and apparently bottomless war chests. Where she emptied those chests, she’s won, but the sheer inefficiency of overloading select contests while ignoring the rest ended up pissing away what should have been an insuperable lead. Rove put Bush in the White House twice with his 50% plus 1, but it must be noted that he was up against Gore and Kerry, who employed similarly targeted campaigning, and that in both elections, Bush did only get that slimmest of margins. If the Dems had sought to win every state in 2000, as Dean had wanted, instead of writing off anything that wasn’t a liberal stronghold, we might not have had to endure the disaster of Bush the lesser. More to the point, if we don’t want to endure another four years under McCain’s promise to maintain Bush’s policies—tax cuts for the wealthy, pointless war in Iraq, and the kind of business deregulation that’s given us the housing crisis—it’s time for Dems to grab disaffected states whose political leanings they once took for granted.