West Offers a 22-Delegate Prize for Right Democrat
By Ned Farquhar
Of the Journal
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are circling like bottled scorpions in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. It's a primeval fight to the finish.
Clinton won the Democratic vote in Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. Obama is leading in pledged delegates from Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming, with Montana yet to vote. It's been a tight Democratic race here in the interior West.
Where do Democrats go from here? To start with, hometown GOP Sen. John McCain will take Arizona out of play. The Democrats' Sen. John Kerry scored surprisingly well there in the 2004 presidential race, perhaps because at least some Arizona voters were reading from the Goldwater script. Carelessly considered foreign entanglements like Iraq don't make sense to Goldwater conservatives, so Kerry had a slim shot at winning Arizona— he might have even taken Arizona with a stronger stance on the war.
Yet even though he called for and supported the misguided and mismanaged Iraq War, McCain's local appeal will make it almost impossible for a Democrat to win in Arizona.
Likewise Utah, Wyoming and Idaho probably aren't worth the fight for the eventual Democratic nominee. In Utah, McCain has had strong support from a popular sitting governor, Jon Huntsman. Wyoming won't break for the Democrats, at least presidentially, under any circumstances. Idaho could surprise, but it's a long shot for Democrats who have to wonder if working hard there would be worth the number of electoral votes it might yield.
The remaining interior West states— Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, Nevada— will be in contention. Together they represent 22 electoral votes, more than the Democrats' "must-win" states of Ohio (20) and Pennsylvania (21), and just short of Florida's 27. It would take work and personality for the Democratic candidate to carry every one of these states. Still, it's possible.
You might or might not remember what the 2004 electoral map looked like. Kerry won the West Coast and almost everything in the north and northeast. Except for California, however, he got no farther south or southwest than Illinois. The middle of the country and the south were solid for Bush. It was a close election, just 286 electoral votes to 251, in which Ohio's 20 votes would have changed the result. But who wants a president who loses everything in the heartland, the South, and the interior West?
My argument, reflecting my recent personal decision to support Obama, is that Clinton too closely resembles Kerry. Though an effective senator for her state, she's a northeasterner like Kerry and the 1988 Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who lost everything in the interior West.
Further her campaign has tended negative in recent weeks. The Wall Street Journal says her own negatives are climbing among voters - 29 percent vs. 15 percent for Obama and 12 percent for McCain— and that 28 percent of Democrats consider her "phony"— twice Obama's 14 percent.
Voters in the western states still in play are tuned in to more positive campaigning. Three of these four states now have strong, vocal, positive Democratic governors who succeeded somewhat grouchier, less activist Republicans.
All four of these states (and no others in the interior West) were counted for hope-based Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992. Westerners liked him because he was straightforward, accessible, and positive— definitely not a Washington insider. By '96, Clinton lost Montana and Colorado. By 2000, only New Mexico went for Al Gore, and none of the four supported Kerry in '04.
Four races, each bleaker for the Democrats. The more concentrated Democrats have become in Washington and the northeast, the less support they have received in the interior West.
The message is clear: If the Democrats want to play in the Mountain West, at least presidentially, they focus on Colorado, Montana, Nevada and New Mexico. They put someone up who's arguably distant from the liberal northeast. They bet on an optimistic, outgoing personality. They concern themselves with bread and butter issues, from hunter access on quality public lands all the way to economic growth, home-grown education, fair immigration policy, the Iraq war, and sensible, affordable health care.
That's the formula for Barack Obama to pick up 22 electoral votes that may never go Hillary Clinton's direction under any circumstances.
Ned Farquhar, a former senior policy adviser to Gov. Bill Richardson, is an energy policy advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The views expressed are his own. E-mail to inthewest@comcast.net
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